Updated on March 18 with information from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

More than one million travelers have passed through a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) preclearance facility at Abu Dhabi International Airport that opened two years ago despite being opposed by U.S. airline industry groups. The UAE emirate remains the only such preclearance location in the Middle East.

Airline industry groups in both the U.S. and Europe lined up in opposition when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent organization, revealed its plan to open the Abu Dhabi facility in early 2013. Supported by some lawmakers, the groups alleged that the facility would help state-owned carrier Etihad Airways attract passengers by facilitating travel through its home airport. But Congress approved the necessary funding in an omnibus appropriations bill that passed the following year, and the facility quietly opened on Jan. 23, 2014.

Airline passengers traveling to the U.S. from Asia or Europe can avoid long customs lines upon arrival by passing through the CBP preclearance facility, which is 85-percent funded by the UAE government. A CBP “preclearance queue times report” from mid-November, the latest date available, shows a longest wait time of 15 minutes, although an earlier report shows a 41-minute wait. Last year, 615,478 travelers used the facility; of those 106,851 started their trips in Abu Dhabi, the balance were transfer passengers, according to Abu Dhabi Airports.

The CBP contends that it can screen for high-risk passengers seeking entry into the U.S. earlier in the travel cycle and help relieve lines at major ports of entry. The customs agency operates other preclearance facilities in Canada, the Caribbean and Ireland, and it has plans to expand the number of locations. (The DHS and CBP are discussing agreements with ten new airports in nine foreign countries “identified as priority locations for air preclearance expansion,” the CBP said in response to an AIN inquiry. The first new preclearance agreement is expected to be signed within the next six months; once the facility construction is completed, the new location would be expected to begin processing passengers within 18 months.)

In its first year of operation, the Abu Dhabi preclearance facility prohibited 450 people from boarding flights to the U.S., some of whom were suspected terrorists, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has said. (There were a total of 1,373 “inadmissible passengers” from the start of the facility’s operation in January 2014 through March 12, 2016, the CBP said.) Within seven months of its opening, in August 2014, CBP agriculture specialists assigned to the facility “intercepted nine Khapra beetle larvae and two skin casts from a bag of dried chick peas” stored in a passenger’s checked luggage from Karachi, Pakistan. The Khapra beetle is an invasive species that destroys grain and causes illness in humans.

In November, the emirate government awarded the CBP facility an Abu Dhabi Award for excellence. Etihad Airways announced the million-passenger milestone on March 17. The airline, Abu Dhabi Airports and the CBP presented that passenger—who was traveling to Washington, D.C.—with 250,000 Etihad Guest Miles and an upgrade to first class.

“We are proud to be one of the few airports around the world, and the only one in the Middle East and Africa to host this facility,” stated Ahmad Al Haddabi, Abu Dhabi Airports chief operations officer. “The fact that today, just over two years since opening in late January 2014, one million passengers have already used our U.S. preclearance services, shows that it is a valuable facility offered by Abu Dhabi Airports and our partner Etihad Airways, and one that is making AUH the airport of choice for passengers traveling to the U.S.”

Khaled Al Mehairbi, Etihad’s senior vice president of airport operations, described the CBP facility as “is a unique selling point” and a “major factor in the success of our growing American connections.”