A mother traveling with family at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) posted a video Sunday showing her son receiving a lengthy body inspection — footage that has been viewed more than 5 million times just on Facebook.
Though the video only shows Jennifer Williamson’s adolescent son being searched for two minutes, she said the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) essentially held her son hostage for longer than an hour.
“We have been through hell this morning,” Jennifer Williamson explained on the social media platform. “They detained Aaron for well over an hour at DFW. (And deliberately kept us from our flight… we are now on an alternate) We were treated like dogs because I requested they attempt to screen him in other ways per TSA rules.”
Williamson says her son has “SPD” which likely refers to sensory processing disorder, which is when the nervous system can’t properly detect or organize signals from the senses, according to the STAR Institute. While severity varies, people with SPD often find if difficult to process and then react to information received through the senses.
Despite having SPD, the boy politely complies to all of the directions and demands of the TSA agent, which included standing in certain positions and raising his arms.
The government employee can be seen rubbing the backs of his hands against the boy’s buttocks several times, while also grabbing the inner part of the thighs on multiple occasions.
At the very end of the video, just when it looks like the agent is done his intensive (even invasive) search, he goes back for more, rubbing the back of his hands over the boy’s groin.
“Let me make something else crystal clear. He set off NO alarms. He physically did not alarm at all during screening, he passed through the detector just fine. He is still several hours later saying ‘I don’t know what I did. What did I do?'” Williams continued. “I am livid.”
Here is the TSA’s full statement, made available to a local ABC affiliate:
TSA allows for a pat-down of a teenage passenger, and in this case, all approved procedures were followed to resolve an alarm of the passenger’s laptop.
The video shows a male TSA officer explaining the procedure to the passenger, who fully cooperates. Afterward, the TSA officer was instructed by his supervisor, who was observing, to complete the final step of the screening process.
In total, the pat-down took approximately two minutes, and was observed by the mother and two police officers who were called to mitigate the concerns of the mother.
The passengers were at the checkpoint for approximately 45 minutes, which included the time it took to discuss screening procedures with the mother and to screen three carry-on items that required further inspection.
The TSA was created following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and tasked with enforcing security protocols for the traveling public, mainly by air.
But since its creation, the federal agency has undergone several apparent scandals and embarrassments. (RELATED: TSA Agents Caught Smuggling 20 Tons Of Cocaine From Puerto Rico)
Agents of the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2015, for example, disguised themselves as normal passengers and brought various forbidden weapons to test TSA employees. The results: TSA agents were only able to detect three out of 70 weapons, a 95 percent failure rate. (RELATED: The TSA Had A Powerpoint On Suicide Bombers That Included Michael Jordan, Bugs Bunny, Elvis Presley)
TSA also failed to identify 73 aviation workers who were on terrorist watch lists.
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