My TSA No-Fly List Saga, Part 2

After my return to the Untied--I mean United--States, I proceeded to muster up what remaining patience I may have had for the Transportation Sekurity Agency and called their 800 number to speak to the office of the Ombudsman.

I got an option to hear menus in English. I usually choose this option simply because, often, the people who they have as Spanish-speaking agents in these kinds of settings either choose to become way too informal way too quickly, or because their Spanish is, frankly, quite jarring to my ears. [It might serve as a humanizing disclaimer that my dad has been a writer for many years, a communications professor, a public speaker, and an editor. Anything as minor as a misplaced conditional conjugation in what should be pluperfect subjunctive clause while we spoke was likely to incurr his immediate correction, and request for oral proofreading before he would continue listening to the rough draft of whatever inane story about what happened during recess that day]. The English menu option, however, dumped me right into a voice mailbox wherein I was expected to recite my story and leave all my details, with the hope that someday, someone might deign to listen to it.

I navigated my way out of Touch-Tone™ land and into the Spanish-speaking line. A woman answered, and I proceeded to tell her my story. I told her about how I had grown up in Peru, and how during 14 years I had never, once, been subjected to anything like this. I told her how my family is from Colombia and how, despite all the troubles there, any kind of scrutiny or check we received at airports had never made us feel like we were being singled out from anyone else. I told her how it saddened me and hurt me that my country, where I was born and where I have made my home for 10 years, would treat me like this--how I had nary a parking ticket and yet I was being treated like a state threat. I underestimated the amount of emotional discomfort this whole situation was causing me, because as I said all this I started to cry.

I rarely cry. It's not some macho posture or some fear of it. I wish I cried more often. But truth is, I have a very hard time doing so--tears very rarely materialize, and I very rarely get to that point of cathartic emotional release. It seems to only happen at the end of very sad or hopeful movies--personal crises (and I've had some major ones over the last few years), extreme stress, depression--none of these seem to make it happen.

In any event, as the woman who answered the phone took down my info, and realized I live in Arlington VA (just up the road from TSA headquarters, in fact), something seemed to click there. She had been very comforting, very reassuring, trying to tell me that it wasn't me, that it was just a match of a name and that it was for safety and how it was unfortunate but necessary. Once I told her about living in Peru and Colombia, she told me that she had grown up in El Salvador and also knew what that was like. So at that point I really tried to drive the point--she, of all people, having come to the US as a refugee from the repression that overtook El Salvador during its civil war, should know what horrible things happen when governments stop being accountable to their people and start treating everyday folk like criminals. She definitely seemed to get it.

Weeks passed. Today I got a letter, telling me that the TSA's Ombudsman had received my letter and that I needed to fill out a Passenger Identity Verification (PIV) form. It asks for all sorts of information (name, birthplace, hair color, so on) as well as notarized copies of three forms of documentation from a list of seven. Thing is, some of the ones on the list are the kinds of things not everyone has: a passport, a voter registration card, a driver's license, a military ID, a state ID, a birth certificate. That means that if you're just an average person who only has a birth certificate and a state ID and haven't registered to vote, aren't military and don't have a passport, you have no physical way of getting yourself off the damn list because you can't meet the criteria for three IDs.

I'm sending them three and a notarized copy of my ACLU membership card.

Chances are, though, that this is likely to make my membership on the list definitive.