On September 30, 2025, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs held a hearing on Examining the Weaponization of the Quiet Skies Program.

Coming just hours before the partial shutdown of Federal government operations, this hearing was sparsely attended, even by members of the committee, and got little press attention. The hearing opened with the Chair and Ranking Minority Member of the committee talking over each other at length.

Much of the argument between Senators and the questioning of witnesses focused not on the general problems of the Quiet Skies traveler surveillance program program or government travel blacklists (referred to euphemistically as “watchlists” throughout the hearing) but on whether these programs have been weaponized to a greater extent under Democratic or Republican administrations.

But if we — and, we hope, members of Congress — can look past the partisan polemics, the testimony and documents introduced into the record of this hearing provide important guidance on what can and should be done to protect all travelers —  regardless of our party affiliation (if any), ethnicity, religious beliefs, or political opinions — against the weaponization of travel blacklists by whatever government is in power.

The Quiet Skies [sic] program assigned officers from the Federal Air Marshals Service (one of the police agencies within the Transportation Security Administration) to accompany and surveil pre-selected airline passengers on flights and in airports.

Quiet Skies is just one of many travel surveillance and blacklisting programs. According to another report by the same Senate committee last yea (under a chair from the opposite side of the aisle), “There are at least 22 different mechanisms that might lead Americans to receive additional screening at airports and other ports of entry or be denied the ability to travel.”

According to precious whistleblower reports and documents obtained by the Senate HSGAC Committee and entered into the record of the hearing last week, Quite Skies targets were selected by a ruleset that incorporated other US government blacklists and watchlists as well as profile-based rules that factored in ethnicity and countries previously visited.

Targets of blacklisting and watchlisting have ranged from people selected based on having used a credit card at a Washington-area airport on or around January 6, 2021, to critics of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, among other activities protected by the First Amendment.

The Quiet Skies program was ended in June 2025 by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noehm.  The same day as the Senate hearing on Quiet Skies last week, the TSA  announced that Secretary Noehm was firing five senior TSA officials associated with the Quite Skies program, including the TSA’s executive assistant administrator for operations support and the deputy assistant administrator for intelligence and analysis.

News reports, presumably based on DHS statements, described Quiet Skies as a “Biden-era” program even though its largest expansion came in 2018  during the first Trump administration. And according to the TSA’s press release last week:

The TSA administrator has legal authority to prevent an individual from boarding an aircraft, task Federal Air Marshals with surveilling an individual, or place them on a watchlist, but it is only intended to be used to track and prevent dangerous criminals and terrorists from carrying out attacks on Americans.

We question whether the TSA Administrator has the authority to prevent someone from traveling by common carrier without getting an order from a judge.  And the TSA and DHS have consistently asserted authority and exercised power — legally or not — to blacklist and surveil travelers without needing any suspicion of criminality.

The bipartisanship of violations of the right to travel through blacklisting and watchlisting was brought out in the response of Mr. Abed Ayoub, Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) to one of the Senators’ questions about the weaponization of watchlists and blacklists against disfavored groups and individuals:

That’s not a partisan problem. That’s a due process problem. When the government can quietly tag one group, it can quietly tag any group, left, right, neither, just depending on who holds power. The answer is the same for all of us: end the watchlists….

Quiet Skies captures only part of the story. It’s a window into a faulty surveillance architecture. The watchlist isn’t about who you vote for. It’s about whether the government has to prove its case when it takes away your rights….

Our community, for the past quarter of a century, we’re… targeted by all the administrations, so we can tell you the experience under Republican and Democratic administrations.

Further guidance about what Congress can and should do was provided by another of the witnesses, Mr. Jim Harper, a Senior Nonresident Fellow of  the American Enterprise Institute:

We intuitively feel we have the right to travel, and there are cases from the Supreme Court that say you have a right to travel: You can move from one state to another and they can’t deny you Welfare benefits when you get there.

There are other cases: A man in San Francisco wanted to fly to Washington, DC, to meet with his Representative,  and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that you don’t have a right to travel on your preferred mode of transportation. They said, no, you can take the train, you can drive, if you want to go to Washington, DC.

A clear right to travel — Americans believe they have it, but the courts haven’t accorded it to them — would give them a position when they went to court.

Court cases challenging the no-fly list (ongoing since 2013, and now on remand following a unanimous favorable Supreme Court decision in 2024) and other travel blacklists and watchlists (ongoing since 2018) have been dragged out for years by the government. The government continues to claim that “merely” being delayed for a few hours or days isn’t sufficiently harmful to a traveler’s rights to provide a basis for a lawsuit.

The Freedom to Travel Act that was introduced in 2021 in the House of Representatives would provide both an explicit statutory right to travel by common carrier and a cause of action for violations of that right by government agencies, carriers, or other entities.

We hope Senators and Representatives moved to act on the issues raised in last week’s hearing on the TSA will re-introduce and co-sponsor the Freedom to Travel Act in this session of Congress, hold committee hearings on it, and incorporate it into appropriate omnibus legislation that has a better chance of passage than a standalone bill.