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Category Archives: Freedom To Travel

Nov 17 2025

Targeting domestic travelers and restricting the right to leave the US

Political commentator and UK citizen Sami Hamdi was finally allowed by the US government to leave the US on November 12, two and a half weeks after he was arrested at San Francisco International Airport when he went to check in for a domestic US flight.

Mr. Hamdi had been a keynote speaker at the annual banquet of the Central Valley chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on October 25 in Sacramento, and was on his way to the next stop on his US speaking tour when he was taken into custody at SFO on October 26.

Mr. Hamdi had obtained a valid US visa prior to his arrival in the US. “Hamdi entered on a B-1/B-2 visa on October 19, 2025, and complied with inspection and admission”, according to the complaint filed on his behalf in Federal court during his detention.

No criminal charges were ever filed against Mr. Hamdi, and there has been no suggestion that he knew his visa had been revoked until he was taken into custody. The government has argued that issuance or revocation of any visa is entirely discretionary, and that once Mr. Hamdi’s was revoked, he was no longer legally entitled to remain in the US.

Even if that were factually and legally correct, it begs two important questions:

First, how did the immigration agents who arrested Mr. Hamdi at SFO know about his travel plans in order to intercept him?

Federal agents can use a TECS alert to monitor reservations for international flights for a person of interest, even without any charges or any warrant for search or arrest. This appears to be how Dr. Mark Bray was targeted for questioning by Feds at Newark Airport on the second of his two attempts on successive days last month to flee the US with his family.

However, Mr. Hamdi went to SFO to check in for a domestic flight, not an international flight. The TSA has long wanted to check reservations for domestic flights against warrants listed in the FBI’s aggregated NCIC database. But so far as we can tell, that hasn’t yet been done. If it were, hundreds of air travelers would be arrested every day, given the number of records of arrest warrants — many of them obsolete  or inaccurate — in NCIC.

And there’s been no hint that there were any criminal charges or any warrant – – even one based on  a sealed indictment — against Mr. Hamdi. So a “warrant check” seems unlikely.

The lists that are checked whenever an airline sends Secure Flight Passenger Data for a  domestic flight to the TSA, before the TSA returns a “Boarding Pass Printing Result” (BPPR) to the airline, are the “no-fly” and “selectee” lists which constitute a subset of the names in the Terrorist Screening Database.

We know that the no-fly and selectee lists have been used primarily to target Muslims. But as the name of the TSDB suggests, these are supposed to be used, and have been justified to courts as being used, solely for individuals who pose an identified threat to aviation security. There’s been no suggestion that Mr. Hamdi did anything to offend the US government or cause it to revoke his visa aside from saying things the US doesn’t want said, much less anything — no matter how offensive to anyone — that posed a threat to aviation security.

It thus seems likely — in the absence of any better explanation — that some Federal agency or official put Mr. Hamdi on the no-fly or selectee list as a way to use airports as a dragnet to catch him the next time he tried to fly, solely on the basis of pure speech that did not provide a basis for any criminal charges. If so, that was a gross abuse of the aviation “security” system and a significant foray into its use as a tool of political retaliation against disfavored speakers. If this could be done to Mr. Hamdi, it could be done to US citizens.

Second, why was Mr. Hamdi not allowed to leave the US sooner?

Normally, non-US citizens denied entry on arrival at US airports are detained only until they can be put on the first flight back to their port of embarkation for the US, or any earlier flight to that or any other destination for which they choose to buy a ticket.

There are five nonstop flights every day from San Francisco to London. Why, instead of being put on one of these flights the day he was detained, was Mr. Hamdi shipped in shackles to a private prison near Bakersfield and held there for more than two weeks?

Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which both the US and the UK are parties, provides that, “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.” And the UN Human Rights Committee has made clear that, “the scope of article 12, paragraph 2, is not restricted to persons lawfully within the territory of a State.”

So once Mr. Hamdi was deemed no longer entitled to remain in the US, and was not (and never had been) subject to any  criminal charges, he had a right, as a matter of international human rights treaty law, to leave the US at any time and for any destination.

Mr. Hamdi’s eventual departure was described as “voluntary”.  But it’s hard to see his leaving the country as uncoerced when they only alternative  he was offered was to remain indefinitely imprisoned without charges or trial.

Detaining Mr. Hamdi without the opportunity to leave the country, and holding him for  more than two weeks without letting him leave, was a clear violation of international law.

Nov 12 2025

A case study in the importance of anonymous travel

The case of Rutgers University professor Mark Bray and his family provides an object lesson in the importance of being able to travel anonymously, and how the practices of governments and airlines endanger travelers by making them identifiable.

Dr. Bray, his partner Dr. Yesenia Barragan (also  a professor at Rutgers), and their two young children tried to flee the US last month after being denounced by members of the Rutgers chapter of Turning Point USA, doxxed,  and receiving death threats. They planned to spend the rest of this academic year teaching remotely from Spain, where Dr. Bray had lived on previous research trips.

Trying to get away from death threats isn’t an uncommon reason for travel, unfortunately. The factors behind the threats against Dr. Bray and his family — Dr. Bray’s scholarship as a historian of anti-fascist activism in Europe and North America since World War II — may be atypical. But thousands of people in the US flee their homes every day to escape from threats or ongoing patterns of domestic violence, often including credible death threats. We’ll never know how many of them have been stalked through their airline reservations.

Dr. Bray and his family bought tickets on United Airlines for a nonstop flight from Newark to Madrid — the most direct route from Rutgers (just a few miles from Newark in New Brunswick, NJ) to Spain. This was, unfortunately, also the most obvious airline and airport for them to use, and the easiest one for any of their local adversaries to stake out.

After they got to the airport, Dr. Bray posted on Bluesky, that, “‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second. We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”

In an interview with the Associated Press from a hotel room where he spent the night before trying again a day later, Prof. Bray said that, “We called the service that made the reservation. They didn’t cancel it. United [Airlines] didn’t cancel it.”

Bary told Mother Jones that airline staff “made a bunch of phone calls and basically said that, somehow, someone at the very last second had canceled our flight reservation—which I didn’t even know was possible.”

Airline staff rebooked the family on the same flight 24 hours later, when they had a different experience. In a later interview after making it to Spain, Dr. Bray described being pulled aside at the departure gate at Newark the next evening by Federal agents for an hour of questioning before being allowed to board the flight to Madrid with his family.

Dr. Bray and his family may never know who cancelled their reservations unless the culprit confesses, but there are two important lessons in this incident:

First, anonymous travel matters, sometimes as a matter of life or death. Both anonymity and the right to travel are never so important as they are for those who are fleeing death threats, whether those threats come from domestic abusers, vigilantes, or the government.

A decision last month by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a case against Lufthansa shows how disclosure of personal information by an airline can put travelers at risk. A gay Saudi Arabian citizen reluctantly provided a copy of his marriage certificate (a same-sex marriage in the US to a US citizen) to Lufthansa. The marriage to a US citizen was relevant to the traveler’s admissibility to the US, but not to the validity of his ticket from Riyadh via Frankfurt to San Francisco, or to Lufthansa’s obligation to transport him. And because homosexuality, as would be conclusively proven by the marriage certificate, is a capital offense in Saudi Arabia, the traveler had not previously disclosed his sexual orientation to the Saudi government. But because Lufthansa staff took actions that may have disclosed his marriage to the Saudi government, he hasn’t dared to return to Saudi Arabia. He has been cut off from his family and community and has been forced to liquidate his real estate there at a loss, among other consequences. The takeaway from the case, at this stage, is that protecting passenger data really can be a life-or-death matter.

Name and ID requirements are touted as measures to “protect” travelers. But for some of the most vulnerable travelers they are a threat to personal security.

We don’t think governments should require passengers on common carriers to identify themselves, or that common carriers should be allowed to require them to do so. On domestic flights in the US, until 1996 anyone could buy a ticket in any arbitrary name and fly without showing any ID. We see no reason not to return to this historic norm.

On international flights, passengers’ names and documents may be relevant to decisions made by governments as to their right to leave the country from which the flight departs  or to be admitted to the destination country on arrival. But travelers can show their passports or other documents or make their claims for admission without documents (for example, as asylum seekers) without needing to identify themselves to airlines or other private parties. The right to leave any country is, under international treaty law, almost absolute. And decisions about admissibility, particularly in the case of asylum seekers, can be made only after arrival on the territory of the destination country. Airlines have no legitimate need to require identifying information about passengers.

Second, identifying information about air travelers isn’t adequately protected.

If governments unnecessarily require travelers to identify themselves to airlines or other common carriers,  then it must be recognized that (1) names and other potentially life-threatening identifying information are provided to these carriers solely to satisfy government mandates, and could not and would not otherwise be required or provided, and (2) the government therefore has the obligation to  make sure that this extremely sensitive information is not retained, used, or disclosed to anyone except the government.

As has long been known, and as the experience of Dr. Bray and his family illustrates yet again, airlines have failed to put in place even minimal protections for passenger data, and governments in the US and other countries, including in Spain and  the European Union, have failed to require airlines to protect this data or to sanction airlines for not doing so.

Read More →

Oct 12 2025

CBP changes procedures for airline passengers with “X” passports

19 C.F.R. 4.7b (3)

CBP regulations require would-be airline passengers to identify as “F” or M”. These regulations were never changed, even when CBP was accepting “X” gender markers.

Traveler Gender CBP Data Element Validation: System Error if missing or invalid. Only submissions of “M” for male and “F” for female are accepted.

[CBP implementation guide says that only “M” and “F” are accepted in APIS data.]

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has announced plans for changes to its procedures for processing information sent to CBP by airlines (and possibly also train, bus, and ferry operators) about passengers on international routes with non-binary or non-gendered “X” gender marker passports, to take effect on Tuesday, October 12, 2025.

The planned changes were disclosed by press release rather than by rulemaking notice in the Federal Register. Implementation has been outsourced to airlines subject to secret “Security Directives” from CBP.  Neither the current nor the planned procedures comply with the law. All of this makes it difficult to predict what will happen to anyone with an “X” gender marker on their passport who tries to make reservations, buy tickets, or check in for international flights after October 12th.

But here’s what we know:

Read More →

Oct 06 2025

The weaponization of travel blacklists

Excerpt from "After Action Report" by a Federal Air Marshal.

[A Federal Air Marshal (FAM) tasked with surveillance of an airline passenger targeted by Quiet Skies lists and/or rules followed the traveler out to the curb and recorded the license plate number of the vehicle in which she left the airport, so that her airline reservations could be integrated with license plate reader data into an uninterrupted multi-modal travel history.]

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. Read More →

Aug 05 2025

Higher fees for visitors to the US

Tourists and business visitors to the US from most of the world will have to pay additional fees or post bonds of from $250 to $15,000 per person — over and above the current $185 per person visa fee — under provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted last month  and separate regulations under a preexisting law published today in the Federal Register.

The consequences for inbound international tourism as well as travel to meetings and conventions in the US from most of the world are likely to be devastating. Nobody is going to hold a meeting — conference, trade show, academic symposium, etc. —  in the US under these rules if they want global participation. If other countries reciprocate, as some probably will, US travelers could be hit with much higher fees when they travel abroad.

The biggest beneficiary of these changes to US laws and regulations is likely to be Mexico, where Cancun is by far the most obvious choice for meeting and convention planners looking for an alternative venue close to the US with more hotel rooms than anywhere in the Americas except Las Vegas, the busiest international airport in Latin America, and more welcoming entry and visa policies than the US for visitors from around the world.

Bonding companies and moneylenders from banks to informal lenders to loan sharks offering to underwrite loans and post bonds for would-be visitors who can’t afford to pay the US visa fees in full are also likely to profit from the new US rules. So will the bounty hunters they will hire to track down and collect from US visitors whose “visa bonds” (and whatever they put up as security for them) are forfeited because they can’t prove to the satisfaction of US authorities that they complied with all of the terms and conditions of entry to and departure from the US — or simply at the “discretion” of US visa officers.

The new US law and regulations establish a three-tier schedule of US fees for short-stay visitors, depending on the citizenship of the traveler:

  1. Citizens of the small number of most US-favored nations in the US Visa Waiver Program will remain eligible to enter the US, after completing an extensive online questionnaire including  a list of all their social media accounts, for only a $21 Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) e-visa fee.
  2. Citizens of countries that are neither especially favored nor disfavored by the US will be required to pay a visa integrity fee of at least $250 (in addition to the visa fee and other visa application requirements). The minimum of $250 is set by law, but the amount can be increased without limit at the discretion of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
  3. Citizens of disfavored countries will be required to post  a visa bond of $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000, with $10,000 as the default, before their visa can be issued.

Read More →

Jun 18 2025

Closing the escape route from the USA to Canada

The governments of both Canada and the US are threatening or testing measures to further close off the Canadian border as the escape route of last resort for those fleeing the US.

Representatives of a coalition of more than 300 refugee rights, civil liberties, gender justice, and migrant advocacy groups came to Parliament Hill in Ottawa today to speak out against Bill C-2, the “Strong Borders Act” introduced by the new Liberal government of Canada. They called for withdrawal of Bill C-2 as a “dangerous shift toward Trump-style anti-immigrant policies and attacks on the rights and freedoms of all residents” of Canada.

Despite its name, Bill C-2 is predominantly a surveillance bill, not a border bill. It would authorize a wide range of seizures of digital devices and data, location tracking, compelled assistance of communications and cloud services providers in extracting and providing the government with data from and about their customers and users, and conversion of requests from the US and other foreign governments into orders legally enforceable in Canada, among a wide range of other Big Brother tactics. Bill C-2 appears to be inspired by, but goes well beyond, the most invasive surveillance practices of the US government.

Bill C-2 is first and foremost a threat to Canadians’ freedom and an attack on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But it’s also a dire threat to the right to leave the US and to the ability of people in the US to exercise, if need be, their right to asylum.

As it pertains to the border, the most significant changes that Bill C-2 would make in Canadian law would be to close most of the few remaining legal pathways for refugees or asylum seekers, especially those fleeing the US, to enter or remain in Canada.

Read More →

Jun 05 2025

New travel blacklist aims to expand US travel surveillance

Late yesterday President Trump proclaimed a new ban on entry to the US or issuance of new US visas to citizens of twelve countries, and ordered drastic restrictions on entry or issuance of visas to citizens of seven others.

The US has long sought to globalize its surveillance and control of travelers.

In the past, the US has held out the carrot of possible admission to the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) to induce governments of favored countries to share information about their citizens with the US. Citizens of countries in the VWP are eligible to enter the US for limited stays and purposes with a simpler, cheaper ESTA rather than a full US visa.

Now the US is using the stick of a travel ban to induce governments of disfavored countries similarly to cooperate, under duress, with US demands that they serve as foreign agents of the US government in identifying, tracking, and collecting and sharing information about their citizens. The countries subject to this new form of transactional, sanctions-based “diplomacy” are those which are unlikely ever be admitted to the VWP.

This latest US travel ban isn’t exclusively limited to countries with mostly-Muslim populations like the series of travel bans proclaimed by  President Trump during his first administration, but was immediately denounced as “transparently racist”.

In addition to its direct effects on the right to travel, freedom of association, and the rights of asylum seekers, the new travel ban appears to be intended as a tool to pressure foreign governments to collaborate with the US in surveillance of their citizens, thereby weaponizing US travel controls to expand extraterritorial US surveillance outsourced to foreign governments.

Read More →

May 30 2025

US State Dept. says silence or anonymity on social media is suspicious

A cable yesterday from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, first reported by  Nahal Toosi and Eric Bazail-Eimil of Politico, directs US embassies and consulates to “conduct a complete screening of the online presence of any nonimmigrant visa applicant seeking to travel to Harvard University for any purpose.”

The cable implies that the main although not the exclusive focus of this special scrutiny of each Harvard-associated visa applicant’s “online presence” will be the content of their social media accounts.

In the cable, Rubio told US consular officers who decide whether to grant or deny visa applications that “the lack of any online presence, or having social media accounts restricted to ‘private’ or with limited visibility, may be reflective of evasiveness and call into question the applicant’s credibility.” In such cases, consular officers are instructed to:

Inform the applicant that his case is subject to review of his online presence, request that the applicant set all of his social media accounts to “public,” and remind him that limited access to or visibility of social media activity could be construed as an effort to evade or hide certain activity. Consular officers must then refer the cases to the Fraud Prevention Unit (FPU).

Neither silence on social media, nor choosing to speak and associate anonymously, pseudonymously, or privately on social media, can Constitutionally or consistent with international human rights treaties be considered “suspicious” or “evasive”.

This directive was issued by Secretary of State Rubio without completing the ongoing process  to obtain approval for the collection of social media account information on visa application forms, as required by the Paperwork Reduction Act. That multi-step approval process was initiated  in early March of this year with a Federal Register notice announcing a 60-day public comment period that closed in early May.

The Identity Project, joined by Privacy Times and Government Information Watch, was among more than a thousand organizations and individuals who submitted comments, almost all of which opposed the proposed collection of social media identifiers.

The government has not yet completed its review of these comments, or taken the next step of submitting its request for approval of the collection of social media identifiers to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

In our comments, we noted some of the reasons visa applicants might reasonably fear that revealing acts of speech and association on social media that are legally protected in the US might place them in grave jeopardy in the countries in which they reside:

We cannot overstate the significance of anonymity or pseudonymity as a potentially life-or-death matter for social media users, most especially for dissidents, victims of discrimination, and those living under the jurisdiction of repressive regimes or otherwise in fear of persecution. Anonymous or pseudonymous speech, publication, and assembly are the only forms of dissident speech, publication, or assembly that are possible under some repressive regimes.

Activities which are protected by the First Amendment, including some which advance U.S. interests in freedom and democracy, are subject to legal sanctions in many other countries.

Capital crimes in Saudi Arabia, for example, include blasphemy against the state religion, disparagement of members of the royal family or the institution of hereditary absolute monarchy, trafficking in prohibited mind-altering substances including alcoholic beverages, and private sexual activity between consenting adults of the same gender in their home.

Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally with which… U.S. agencies might be expected to share information obtained through this collection of information – including information that could identity Saudi Arabian citizens or residents who have perpetrated these “crimes”. As a result, this collection of information could subject these individuals, including pro-democracy activists, to sanctions in Saudi Arabia ranging from public whipping to beheading.

Even if this compelled disclosure of information were lawful – which we believe it isn’t – it would be bad public policy. The possibility of anonymous and pseudonymous discourse is an essential element of an open marketplace of ideas, and plays a particularly important role in the places where identifiable speakers and speech are subject to the greatest repression.

Anonymous and pseudonymous speech and publication have a long and honorable tradition in the U.S., going back to the anonymous authors and publishers of anti-monarchist handbills in the British colonies of North America and the pseudonymous authors of the Federalist Papers. Today, these works would probably be published on social media, and “Publius” – the pseudonym used by the authors of the Federalist – would probably be a social media identifier rather than a name printed on the title pages of a series of pamphlets.

Anonymity and pseudonymity are especially critical for social media users, whose speech can be, and sometimes is, held not only against themselves but against any or all of their social media “friends”, friends-of-friends, associates, contacts, and/or commenters.

The “special vetting” of visa applicants identified as intending to visit Harvard — students, faculty, staff, guest speakers, patients coming to the US for treatment at Harvard hospitals, attendees at Harvard conferences and symposia, etc. — is described as “a pilot for expanded screening and vetting of visa applicants. This pilot will be expanded over time.”

Rather than being expanded, this directive should be rescinded and the “pilot” ended.

May 28 2025

200,000 people a day fly without REAL-ID

The real story of REAL-ID is that more people than ever are flying in the US without REAL-ID, with ID the TSA considers “unacceptable”, or with no ID at all.

In a show of massive passive resistance to baseless threats by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to prevent people without REAL-ID from traveling by air, more than 200,000 flyers without REAL-ID passed through TSA checkpoints and boarded scheduled airline flights in the US last Friday, setting a new record for people flying with no ID or with ID the TSA deems “unacceptable” because it isn’t considered compliant with the REAL-ID Act of 2005.

Despite twenty years of false claims that airline passengers without REAL-ID would be  turned away at TSA checkpoints after the REAL-ID deadline, we’ve been unable to confirm any report of a traveler blocked by the TSA for lack of REAL-ID in the three weeks since the TSA claimed that it would start enforcing the REAL-ID Act at airports.

The continued flow of millions of air travelers without REAL-ID through TSA checkpoints since the TSA’s self-imposed enforcement deadline confirms what we’ve said all along: no law requires airline passengers on domestic flights in the US to have or show any ID, and the REAL-ID Act hasn’t changed that. You can still fly without ID, and you shouldn’t be worried that you won’t be able to fly without REAL-ID.

The TSA says that since the REAL-ID enforcement deadline on May 7, 2025, 93% of travelers arriving at TSA checkpoints have shown REAL-IDs. That leaves 7% who have not. Last Friday, the busiest air travel day of the Memorial Day weekend at the start of the summer vacation season, the TSA screened more than three million air travelers. That means more than 200,000 flyers passed through TSA checkpoints without REAL-ID on Friday.

Despite the record number of travelers passing through TSA checkpoints over the holiday weekend, there were few if any delays, and none attributable to REAL-ID noncompliance. Travelers without REAL-ID reported little or no additional questioning, search, or delay.

So far as we can tell, none of the TSA’s procedures for travelers without ID or with “unacceptable” ID, including calls to the TSA’s ID Verification Call Center or demands for travelers to fill out and sign the illegal TSA Form 415 (“Certification of Identity”), have been applied to  those with “noncompliant” driver’s licenses or state IDs.

The bottom line, at least for now, is that TSA hasn’t tried to enforce a nonexistent requirement for ID to fly. We’re pleased that so many travelers have seen through the TSA’s lies and ignored its false threats.

These threats continue, and many people continue to struggle to obtain the compliant ID they’ve been told they will “need” to fly or for other purposes. See for example, this poignant story of the travails  of elders in Alaska who need to fly to get to medical care. Women who’ve changed their name through marriage or divorce, and trans or non-binary people who’ve changed the gender marker on some or all of their documents, are also among those having particular trouble assembling the documentation needed for REAL-ID. Congress still needs to repeal the REAL-ID Act. That’s most likely if the public continues to resist or simply to ignore both the REAL-ID Act and the TSA’s empty threats.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation. We welcome your firsthand reports. Have you flown since May 7th without REAL-ID, or with no ID? How did it go?