The night my papers got lost at the border crossing in Tijuana, 2018

I was waiting in line for 11 hours with my wife and kid. When I finally got to the window, the officer said my residency permit wasn't in the system anymore. Someone had flagged it as expired even though I had the renewal receipt right there. I had to sleep on a bench outside the office for two nights while they sorted it out. My wife was crying on the phone with a lawyer back home. Has anyone else had a simple paperwork mistake snowball into a nightmare like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

cole_robinson12d ago

Did you end up getting any kind of compensation for the time you were stuck there? I had a similar thing happen at a different border where my visa got flagged as invalid because of a typo someone made, and I spent three days sleeping in a McDonald's parking lot waiting for the embassy to open. It's crazy how one little error can completely wreck your life for a few days while you're just trying to do things the right way.

allen.cole12d ago

My buddy @cole_robinson had almost the same thing happen to him at the Canadian border near Buffalo last summer. The clerk typed his middle name wrong on the eTA application and the system flagged him as a different person with a criminal record. He was stuck in secondary screening for 14 hours eating vending machine crackers while they tried to figure out he wasn't some fugitive.