Category Archives for Airports.
A full-time TSA officer at Boston Logan is accused of collecting $47,526 in pandemic unemployment over 16 months while still working at the airport. Prosecutors say he repeatedly filed weekly certifications claiming he had no income, and he’s now charged with wire fraud.
Cases like this have surfaced repeatedly among TSA screeners, highlighting how pandemic programs prioritized speed and access—and made fraud easier to attempt and slower to catch.
A group of students and parents showed up at a Florida airport to confront a travel agent accused of scamming families out of a long-planned Europe trip. As he arrived under escort, the students yelled “Scumbag” while he came down the arrivals escalator—an encounter families described as cathartic, even as many are still out significant money.
Airports are replacing agents with biometric e-gates, and boarding increasingly means one thing: an unobstructed face scan matched against your passport photo and the flight manifest. A viral clip of veiled women being told to uncover at the gate got cheered for all the wrong reasons—but the real story is how “biometric exit” normalizes government face-matching as a condition of travel, and how simple accommodations can handle identification without turning it into a spectacle.
Airlines enforce the 50-pound limit with baggage scales that aren’t always perfectly calibrated—so some passengers have started “helping” the reading by quietly supporting one side of the suitcase with a foot while it’s being weighed. The number drops because part of the bag’s weight transfers off the scale, and influencers even promote it as a tip. It’s also fraud, and agents say they see (and cringe at) it all the time.
Denver’s city council just voted to deny an airport lease because it didn’t like the airline’s ICE deportation work — a move that looks like unjust discrimination under the FAA grant assurances tied to federal airport funding. The vote doesn’t kick the carrier out, but it creates an obvious opening for the Trump administration to intervene through the FAA compliance process and put Denver’s federal money at risk.
CBP detained a school superintendant for hours at Houston’s airport after a trip to Nicaragua, and he says agents told him he had no Fourth Amendment rights while pressuring him for passwords and devices. Now the U.S. citizen is suing DHS to curb border phone searches and challenge the government’s suspicionless device search rules.
TSA is sending ICE airline passenger lists multiple times a week, running everyone who flies through an immigration-enforcement match using the Secure Flight pipeline that was built for aviation security. It turns airports into chokepoints for law enforcement: broad roster surveillance first, detain-and-sort-out-later in the terminal, and a structure that invites mission creep beyond immigration.
Video from Orange County’s John Wayne Airport shows a contract security guard in a white sedan racing down an active taxiway between jets as air traffic control calls a “high speed chase on the taxiway.” Planes slam on the brakes, workers scramble, and officials now blame a “possible medical episode.”
Congress is selling Section 373 of the new defense bill as a “helicopter safety” fix after the deadly midair near Reagan National. In reality it invites military training flights back into DC’s already-crowded airspace, with a built-in waiver so the Pentagon can bypass key protections whenever it claims national security demands it.
The U.S. wants visa waiver visitors to hand over five years of social media plus more personal data just to get an ESTA — and to apply only through a mobile app. That won’t just hassle Europeans and other low-risk travelers, it risks driving them to other destinations, cutting flights, cargo capacity, and tourism jobs here at home.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
