Anyone arrived on a flight into San Francisco airport recently?

[Littlestrickle]

We are flying into SFO soon and I wondered (a) how long the immigration queue/time is likely to be, and (b) the snacks I taking onto the plane; anything uneaten can I take that with me to eat up during my holiday?

Flew into SF last summer but it was via Philly, so immigration happened there (no queue at all). Travelled to Boston, however, in May and there were literally hundreds in the queue and just ONE international desk open!! I gather that this is not uncommon and there are big problems with cuts in the service and it seems they couldn't give a stuff how this comes across to international visitors. There were many more US citizen desks open, for instance. Allow an hour or two to be on the safe side and, if you can possibly can, get one of you to get off the plane quick to get in the queue with the other bringing up the rear with kids/hand luggage etc.. This may not be possible if you have young kids, but we managed it with teens.

If the snacks are very packaged and processed you might be okay, but when I flew into US last year with a friend she got her whole luggage searched due to forgetting something really innocent like an M&S fruit salad in her hand luggage and got a massive lecture for smuggling fruit!

I think you'd be OK with dry snacks - crackers or biscuits or whatever. I always have been, anyway, although to be fair I've never been stopped and searched.

You may well have to wait at least an hour. It very much depends on how many immigration officials are working at the time and how many other flights arrive at the same time as yours does. All passengers are individually processed. You will be fingerprinted and photographed on arrival at the immigration booth.

Snacks are fine to take onto the aircraft but you must leave any uneaten fruit behind on the aircraft.

The flight ahead of me in Boston was from Tokyo, and none of the passengers appeared to speak English, and none of the immigration officials spoke Japanese, and each person/pair going through the one desk took at least 5 minutes. (I was so bored, I timed them on my phone!) At one point, a woman with a toddler decided to take her child to the loo, part-way through her turn, and the official just waited for her to return, without calling the next in the queue. She was 9 minutes from start to finish!!

used to live there so have flown in and out many times .. Always not a problem

Just back, we didnt wait long at all but we flew from Newark as we stopped in New York for a few days first. Even getting fingerprinted and getting through security there was a lot quicker than I had anticipated. My kids loved flying into SF airport as we were so close to the water!

We flew a couple of years ago and queues were terrible. I was on my own with 2 small dc, so were last off the plane. We queued for about 2 hours. Hopefully things have improved since then!
btw snacks didn't seem to be a problem - although most of ours were gone by the time we got through immigration

We got very very lucky when we went through SFO in August. No queues at all but the guy on the desk said it had been a two hour wait earlier in the day.