Airports are moving to e-gates, where facial recognition is used to confirm identity. The government wants more than a person looking at you and confirming it against the photo in your passport.
Here’s an e-gate with passengers in robes and face veils. I think it’s Tampa? I’m sure readers will know. The system needs an unobstructed face to match a live image to the passenger’s ID. And there’s a lot of cheering of passengers needing to uncover veils to identify themselves.
- I don’t like societies forcing women to cover their face
- But I also don’t like government impinging on a woman’s freedom to do so
I also don’t like biometric scanning as a condition of exercising the right to travel. But once that’s accepted, there’s also nothing wrong with having people uncover themselves – in fact, that’s how it works in Muslim societies.
Leftist’s are FURIOUS after a video goes viral of Muslim women having to show their faces before getting on a plane..
Thoughts?? pic.twitter.com/zBMn720arn
— American AF (@iAnonPatriot) December 16, 2025
At many international departure gates, a camera is mounted at the gate or held by a government customs officer or airline staff member, to take a live photo of each passenger during boarding.
That image is sent to the Customs and Border Protection cloud-based Traveler Verification Service, which compares each person’s mugshot to a gallery built from your passport or visa photo and compares it to the flight manifest. The government has already checked the flight manifest and decided who can travel and who can’t. Now they want to match people against the manifest. If there’s a match, you’re allowed to depart the country. If there’s no match, you get a manual document check.
Here, social media comments are overwhelmingly cheering enforcement due to anti-Muslim sentiment, which I take to be a function of the account that posted the video (“no more concessions / assimilate / ‘Islam incompatible’”). There’s no concern for civil liberties, privacy, or religious accommodation (or these biometric gates slowing boarding).
Identity verification requires seeing a face. Whether it’s a human doing a manual comparison or an algorithm doing a match, you can’t verify a passport photo against a fully covered face. But there are plenty of ways to do it:
- public vs private area
- same-gender staff availability
- brief lift vs full removal
Generally, in Muslim societies a woman’s face and hands are not awrah (not required to be covered. In Egypt, face coverings are permissible but not required. So showing the face for routine needs is fine, and “only to female officer in a private room” is an extra-strict practice.
There are societies treating covering of the face as required in front of non-mahram men, but even there usually there are carve outs for necessity like courts and identification. Even among people who treat niqab as religiously required, there are accommodations that allow showing the face for identification purposes.
It’s how UK government tells officials to handle face coverings when security ID checks are needed, and you’ll see separate lanes or rooms, with female staff, in Saudi Arabia. And they’ve been deploying e-gates integrated with visas and biometrics.
Historically, the U.S. didn’t have exit controls. The government vetted people entering the country, but there was no checkpoint to leave. Now we have “biometric exit.” The program is authorized by 8 U.S.C. § 1365b which originated with 2001’s PATRIOT Act and was further developed in the Enhanced Border Security Act of 2002. This makes us more like the rest of the world. But being more like Saudi Arabia in this way is not a good thing?
There was a case in Florida not too long ago involving a Muslim woman’s driver’s license. As we all know, driver’s licenses must have a picture of your face on i. This Muslim woman refused to take off her face covering for the photo. The courts said she must take off the covering otherwise it would be impossible to ID her and in any case, driving is a privilege not a right. The same would be applied here.
It is the red hats making a spectacle of things again. Instead of coming up with a policy that works ( as was mentioned) there is the political nonsense to degrade and dehumanize people just because of race or religion. Another symptom of the current fascist regime.
Gary – one minor point. While the right to travel is generally understood to be vallid (not specifically in Constitution or Bill of Rights but references to liberty and freedoms clearly cover it and only restriction is typically due to a court order) there is NO right to travel by a specific method. Therefore, there is no unalienable right to fly commercially and you have to comply with government rules (and meet certain requirements) to do so. If you disagree you can drive, take a train, take a boat or fly private.
As for this requirement, I agree much to do about nothing and has been handled throughout the world. I, for one, am glad to see the US implementing technology to better identify travelers and also speed up immigration and passport control when you enter the country. Most countries I go to now, especially in Asia, I rarely speak with an immigration officer and simply have a photo taken, scan my passport and proceed into the country. I have Global Entry which makes it easier for me returning to the US but we should have the technology, as the leading technology country in the world, to make it easier for everyone.
I agree completely with exit controls from the U.S.. And I don’t object to doing it biometrically. It helps deter and prevent stays past the expiration of one’s visa – which is the most common reason for people being in the U.S. illegally. As a genealogist, I know that passenger manifests are a poor method of identifying incoming and exiting travelers.
We aren’t becoming “more like Saudi Arabia”. We are becoming more like most other western countries. I’ve been to the E.U. three times in the last six months, and I have an entry and an exit stamp for each visit. I have entry and exit stamps for the countries in South America and Asia that I have visited (more than 30).
Once, when my late wife and I were on a Mediterranean cruise, we left the cruise one day early in Livorno, rather than proceed to Civitavecchia. A bored customs person at the entrance to Livorno harbor waved us through. When we finally exited the E.U. at FRA, the efficient German Border Police there spent 30 minutes asking us why we didn’t have an E.U. entry stamp – where did we enter and when and how? We had to produce our cruise documentation and account for our post-cruise time. Finally, they threw up their hands, made rude remarks about lazy Italian Border Officials, and gave us exit stamps and let us through to our flight.
@Retired Lawyer
Same thing for me, but I left the cruise in Civitavecchia (normal end of cruise), and there were no immigration controls. Same thing in Germany, but the guy let me pass without any documentation request.
Exit control won’t prevent an overstay, but will identify it and lead to the offender being refused entry in the future.
I am 100% all for respecting religious practices and customs, but not at the expense of security. I’m sorry, but it is far too easy to throw on a face covering and claim religious persecution / intolerance as a way to evade security surveillance and detection. While I do think our current regime is islamophobic, racist and generally evil, I do not think this is a bad policy. This is SOP in Europe, the GCC and other technologically advanced nations.
Until we have a different biometric option that enables one’s face to remain covered, we’ve got what we’ve got. If I can go through FBI background checks, fingerprinting and other forms of advanced identification to prove I am not a threat, folks can remove face coverings. Religion is a choice.
This seems to be a non-issue. Surely, there are veiled women flying all the time in and inside / outside to/from the US. When has anyone heard of a refusal to identify by removing a veil?
In case some of them do (or will) – simple solution : don’t fly. Take car, bus or whatever or don’t travel.
The actual larger issue is that are hundreads of thousand of radical Islamists who are now US citizens (and some that aren’t) living in the US, and they do not wish well for America or most of it’s population. Most of those are not taking any action due to either fear for their or their family’s sake, or out of laziness / convenience. But, they absolutely identify with extreme Islmaist agendas (some differ from one another, but the main theme is the same)
When I approach these unconstitutional machines, I am going to start wearing a veil with an autopen printed on the front. “This is my face”
This isn’t about religious freedom; though, focusing on Muslims is probably easier for Gary’s mostly-American audience to stomach; now, imagine, if passengers were asked to remove their kippah, durag, red hat, arm band, hood, or whatever may or may not block their faces… *raises eyebrows*
If some can refuse to allow a clear picture of their face for ID then everyone should be able to refuse to allow a clear picture of their face.
“Until we have a different biometric option that enables one’s face to remain covered, we’ve got what we’ve got.”
Fingerprints? Iris scans? Etc.
I resent is this being done on domestic flights. I don’t care if you say “my face is my boarding pass”, my boarding pass is in my hand – just scan it already. You don’t need to self-justify the money you spent on the fancy toys, guys…you need to stop spending it.
There are already accommodations made for certain religious groups. The Amish may fly using a goverment issued ID that does not have a photo – TSA recognizes it and allows it. There is no reason similar accommodations can not be made for other groups. We don’t get to pick and chose what religions get preferential treatment.
A similar issue is care of passengers that have a medical accommodation. The US does a pretty good job of allowing passengers to not be dehumanized during security screening but other countries do a pitiful job. In the US and some foreign countries, if you have a medical device which shows up on a scan and requires verification which can’t be done physically w/ clothes on), taking a person to a closed booth by a same sex TSA agent is done. I have seen other countries require passengers to show ostomies in full view of other countries – and some EU countries are part of that.
Security screening is done in far fewer locations than gate boarding. It is impossible to build a booth for every gate for the very few number of people that do not want to show their face – at least at US airports which do not have international flights only departure areas.
There is a whole lot that could be improved; it is simply a matter of what each country decides to prioritize and what each traveler decides is no-go for them at those airports – hopefully fully aware of what they might face