International travelers arriving at Los Angeles International Airport should expect some of the country’s longest waiting times to pass through customs heading to their destination, according to US Customs Border Protection data.
Every day, thousands of foreign visitors arrive at Southern California’s largest travel hub to visit family, do business, and tour the area. But first, they need to go through customs.
In 2024, CBP said its agents processed more than 420 million travelers at ports of entry nationwide, up 6.6% from the previous year.
Thousands of people have passed through LAX, according to CBP data. Updated daily, the airport received an average of 550 foreign arrivals last summer, making it the busiest international terminal in the country at the time.
There were a large number of suspicious distinctions. LAX arrivals had the second longest customs wait time at major airports lined up from June to August 2024, with an average of over 30 minutes. Only Chicago O’Hare International Airport has deteriorated.
The 30-minute wait time for foreign tourists is averaged over the past 12 months, with waits being significantly longer during peak trips, data show.
For non-citizens, travelers waited an average of 113 minutes on Labor Day weekend last year, but at the biggest backup, at least one unfortunate passenger passed through customs waited 245 minutes or more, or four hours.
US citizens returning from overseas had much shorter waiting times at LAX last summer, with an average of just under 19 minutes, but LAX is still the third-later at customs compared to other major airports. Only O’Hare and Orlando International Airport were waiting for a long time.
On July 19, a Tiktok user posted a video of the hellish line leading to customs, captioning “Everyone from the hot euro summer.”
Two days later, another Tiktok user posted an even longer line. His caption asked how the city could fix the situation in time to host the Olympics in 2028.
The worst summer of 2024 was also the Labor Day weekend when we arrived at the International Terminal in LAX, with US citizens leading on average at 74 minutes, with an astounding peak wait time of over three hours.
And, according to the latest data, the pace of arrivals is being picked up again as we head into the busy summer travel season.
LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal rose nearly 4% year-on-year in April at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal. This suggests that data from Los Angeles World Airport could be even busier this summer than last year.
Jaime Ruiz, a spokesman for CBP, said: “There were more flights, more travelers.”
Many arrivals are long-distance flights, he said, and they often overlap with weather and scheduling issues that exacerbate customs crowding. “Waiting time is a kind of moving goal. It’s a daily situation,” Lewis said.
