mattw89

Hello Everyone!

Wow. Seven years since I posted on here! Time flies. I hope all is well with everyone.

Just a quick update. I moved to Seattle aged 22 and this forum helped me an awful lot, and here I am now 29, living a little further south on the west coast -
down in LA. Anyway, for various reasons, I've decided to pursue Citizenship rather than my original plan of staying on a green card only.

While looking through the application form, it asks to list every trip that I've done internationally for the duration I have held my green card. On the CBP website I managed to request and download a listing of every international trip I have done. The total was about 74 international trips...(but all it shows is the outbound date, no information on duration or the destination).

I've checked with my company and they don't have records of these, and I have just a sporadic fraction of these documented over the years. Has anyone heard of this before and any suggestions on what to do here?

Thanks,
Matt

Rete

Are you sure about that? I believe it only asks about trips for the last 5 years prior to your application if you are using the regular timeline for eligibility and 3 years if using the marriage to a USC timeline.

You can only do the best that you can do. Give them what you know about and remember.

aquatone

When I had to do this back in 2006, I remember laboriously going through my passports and matching the entry and exit stamps of the various countries I visited. That helped reconstruct my travel history. Hopefully you have past diary and calendar records to help also.

S Folinsky

General comment: it is bad news to make a "material" misrepresentation. That term can be fuzzy in it's application, but let's say that erroneous information would not have made any difference, the error is not material. For example, if one said they were out for ten days and they were absent a fortnight - not only is the error innocent, it is not material. ( Assuming that absense had not been crossing into break in residence issues).

There was a Supreme Court case just last year on related issues. I seem to recall that, in oral argument, the Chief Justice commented that failure to report speeding on the road would not be a big deal.

Jerseygirl

We put ‘to the best of our knowledge’. Didn’t have any problems with that.

mattw89

Thanks Everyone. I'll try the best of my knowledge approach.

The majority of my travel has been for work, and some trips are very much just a few days here and there and have long been forgotten about. Then also living in Seattle, plenty of day trips or weekends in Vancouver BC.

I'll see how it goes....

Jerseygirl

Hubby had travelled overseas hundreds of times. For these we looked at the stamps in his passport...including an expired PP. The problem arose with the many road trips to Canada...there were no stamps in our PP for those.

S Folinsky

On those "day trips" - if any part of a day is in the United States, the whole day counts. (The day count software on electronic versions of the forms miss that one, but usually "no harm, no foul")

GeoffM

I uploaded a scanned, signed note from myself stating that I *think* I had an outside trip about 5 years prior (so might be, might not be inside the window) but I couldn't find any evidence of it. We went through my passport looking for the re-entry stamp to no avail. The airline's account history only went back 18 months. Since we submitted nearly 9 months after we were eligible to apply, it still didn't take the days out of the country anywhere near the limit.

Mercury39

Counts as being in the USA, and therefore does not count as a day outside the US?
The online version of the form made all trips entered with the same start/end date as zero days.

S Folinsky

I see I wasn't as clear as I should've been.

Both the day of departure and the day of return count as days IN the United States. So, let's say you take an overnight trip into Canada. That trip counts as zero days out.

Olly_

I've started a spreadsheet to keep track of every trip outside the US since becoming a LPR so hopefully this should be simple when my turn for naturalization arrives.

Havnfun

I just applied for Citizenship last week, you only need the last 5 years of travel records. I went to the Customs and Border Protection website and download a list of my arrivals & departures.

https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/home

Are you doing the online N-400? I found it was a lot easier than the printed form.

GeoffM

I heard you could obtain a list but didn't realise it was that easy! Thanks for that link.

Turns out my passport doesn't appear to have been stamped in a 2013 visit to the UK (the US entry stamp on return is missing). But it is logged on that website.

dave2702

Take lots of pictures with your Iphone, it becomes an invaluable aide-memoir for when you've been in and out of the country

Recently doing my N400, I just had to look at the Places option of pictures and from there just got the dates as I was outside of the US