The TSA checkpoint has become America’s daily ritual of submission—a place where law-abiding citizens shuffle shoeless through machines, surrender their water bottles, and hope they won’t be pulled aside for additional screening. It’s a post-9/11 bargain most of us accepted without much thought. We traded a little dignity for the promise of safety.

But twenty-three years into this experiment, the questions keep mounting. Has the Transportation Security Administration actually made us safer, or have we simply grown accustomed to the theater of it all? Independent tests have repeatedly shown weapons slipping through undetected. Meanwhile, grandmothers get patted down and toddlers trigger extra scrutiny. The agency burns through billions annually, yet the fundamental approach hasn’t evolved much since 2001.

Now, a new voice is adding to the growing chorus of critics—and this one comes from inside the house, so to speak. Evita Duffy-Alfonso, the 26-year-old daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, took to X this week to blast the TSA after an experience she called degrading and unconstitutional.

From her post on X:
I nearly missed my flight this morning after the TSA made me wait 15 minutes for a pat-down because I’m pregnant and didn’t feel like getting radiation exposure from their body scanner. The agents were passive-aggressive, rude, and tried to pressure me and another pregnant woman into just walking through the scanner because it’s ‘safe.’

Duffy-Alfonso didn’t stop there. She called the pat-down “absurdly invasive” and said she felt “treated like a terrorist in my own country.” Her conclusion was blunt: the TSA violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable, warrantless searches and should be abolished entirely. She even tagged President Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, urging action.

The TSA responded with boilerplate language, saying they’re “aware of the incident” and take complaints seriously. Cold comfort for a pregnant woman who barely made her flight after following the agency’s own opt-out procedures.

Here’s what really gets me. Duffy-Alfonso isn’t some random traveler screaming into the void. She’s a conservative commentator married to a congressional candidate, with a father sitting in the president’s cabinet. If she’s getting pressured and treated like a suspect, what do you think is happening to the rest of us? You know—the people without platforms, without connections, without anyone who’ll take our call?

The question isn’t whether we need security at airports. Of course we do. The question is whether we’ve allowed a bloated bureaucracy to calcify into something that neither respects constitutional principles nor keeps pace with modern technology. We can screen passengers without treating every American like a potential terrorist. We can embrace innovation without demanding people surrender biometric data or submit to procedures they’d rather avoid. At least, I’d like to believe we can.

Maybe it’s time to reimagine the whole enterprise. Not abolition for its own sake, but genuine reform—security that actually works and treats free citizens with a shred of dignity. Our founders understood that liberty and safety aren’t mutually exclusive. Somewhere between the shoe removal and the full-body pat-downs, we seem to have forgotten.

Sources: Fox News, Mail Online