Muslim travelers believe security agents manipulate the metal detector to justify searches

Evidence

Ayesha, a twenty-nine-year-old Pakistani American Muslim woman and self-employed entrepreneur, also wears the hijab and has been subjected to “random” stops and searches in airports. She told me she was always searched at the security checkpoint line and she suspected that airport security agents intentionally made the metal detector signal an alert when her husband walked through. She and her husband took great care to remove any items that might cause the metal detector to go off, yet it still went off every time he passed through it. I did not interview Ayesha’s husband, but there is a possibility that he was on the Selectee List and was thus subjected to more surveillance at the security line because his ticket had four Ss on it. She told me her husband was routinely stopped and searched by TSA agents and how they both felt they were unfairly profiled. After 9/11, she said she did not want to fly United Airlines because it was one of the airlines that was hijacked and she feared facing extra scrutiny because she is easily identified as a Muslim. She recalled that the last time she flew, a TSA agent asked her to take off the hijab. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 214

Categorization

• QUESTION: The belief that agents deliberately trigger the alarm is striking — worth chasing whether other interviews in the book corroborate this perception of engineered alerts, and whether the Selectee List (‘four Ss’) is documented practice.