No TSA Patdowns for Muslim Brotherhood Members Traveling to US

Muslim Brotherhood members are given the chance to opt out of extra scrutiny when flying to the United States. But if you are a great-grandmother named Doris Jones from Evansville, Indiana, better wear a clean set of undershorts for the strip search, you fit the profile.

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A U.S. official familiar with immigration procedures told the IPT in 2012 that the exemption for the Brotherhood delegation was “extraordinary.”

The records, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. They offer few details. The State Department released a one-page document labeled “Compiled References to MB Delegation Arrival and Departure”.

“In the coming days, we’re going to write down a list of procedures for dealing with MB visits to the United States,” an April 16, 2012 entry says.

A March 30 communication offers help dealing with “FJP Delegation and POE [port of entry] Courtesies: Please let the desk know over the weekend if you’d like our help submitting to DHS the ‘Special Alerts,’ which are used to request that travelers not be pulled into secondary [inspection] upon arrival at a point of entry.”

But one member of the Brotherhood delegation, which met with U.S. academic and senior government officials, had been linked to a child pornography investigation in the United States years earlier. Under normal circumstances, he likely would have been subjected to extra scrutiny.

The records released do not address that issue. They do, however, report that “The MB/FJP delegation’s scheduler reported that their arrival at JFK on Saturday went very smoothly.”

And the official in question, Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, traveled separately and was escorted through security checks in Minneapolis and New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport “In response to a request from the MB … We did not hear anything further from the MB so we assume to departure went smoothly,” the records show.