The United States has no “sterile transit”, if you connect to a flight in an airport on US soil you will need a US visa and need to clear customs before boardin

The United States has no “sterile transit”, if you connect to a flight in an airport on US soil you will need a US visa and need to clear customs before boarding your next flight. I speak from experience to, I traveled to Montreal from Australia for a python conference. ESTA program visa for transit, had to play the obligatory twenty questions game with the Homeland Security goons at LAX “why are you coming to the USA?” “To get my connecting flight to Montreal”, “Why are you flying to Montreal?”, “For a software developer conference”, etc… the standard routine border crossing interrogation. Small mercy was getting to skip the shoe removal nonsense (this was years ago so it was still a widely performed piece of security theatre) had to unpack and lay flat 3 different laptops, iPad, iPhone, DSLR, and worst of all several boxy li-po booster batteries which after seeing how they look on an X-ray scanner I continue to count my blessings that I didn’t get immediately tackled to the ground and treated like a terrorist, the damn things looked comically like explosive devices… the sort you saw people demonstrate the equipment with so the sort you expect they would be far more concerned about. Anyway, it’s just US government policy that the USA gets to fuck with anyone flying into the country even if they never leave the international terminal of the airport, it’s pretty stupid if you ask me, but eliminating “Transit with out visa (T-WOV)” was one of the first things the USA did as part of the whole 911 knee jerk reaction, so yeah… blame 911 for yet another annoying thing about airports!