My family and I are travelling on Qatar to LAX from Africa, we have a 8hr layover in Doha - is there a possibility of obtaining pre-clearance US immigration status while in Doha to allow easier arrival at LAX? Do you have to be a US citizen?
1
-
4FYI, if an airport does have pre-clearance facilities, all passengers to the US are pre-cleared, regardless of their citizenship. (Because of this, some flights from pre-clearance airports land at US airports that lack immigration facilities, such as New York's La Guardia airport.) Otherwise it would be necessary to keep track of which passengers were and weren't pre-cleared, which would be worse than clearing the whole plane in the US.– phoogSep 15, 2016 at 19:11
Add a comment
|
2 Answers
There are no US Preclearence facilities in Doha. You will have to go through US Immigration and Customs when you arrive in Los Angeles.
There was some discussion about starting such a service in Doha, but those plans seem to have been scrapped as of last year amid concerns over flight delays and political battles between US carriers and the ME3 airlines.
answered Sep 15, 2016 at 17:58
This answer makes sense but is wrong.
Not any flight from an airport with pre-clearance uses pre-clearance.
Example is Ethiopian from Dublin.
They don't use it, because they start from another terminal.
To track whether it is pre-cleared or isn't, you could also track from airlines from an origin, not that difficult.
But even not all flights from same airline uses pre-clearance.
But with flight numbers it is even with an excel sheet easy to overwatch.
-
1That varies by airport, perhaps, or by country. In Canada, if the US offers preclearance at a given airport, all US flights from that airport are precleared. But the US and Canada have done preclearance like this for decades, so it may be different in some ways than how it's done at more remote airports. Sep 13, 2018 at 17:00