Ranking Member Peters' Questions: September 30th, 2025 - Quiet Skies Hearing

Mr. Ayoub, one of the issues that I've heard again and again from people in the community and others is just how broken the redress process is for people who believe that they are unjustly or mistakenly caught up in the watch listing system. Mr. Crowley, I understand your wife, my understanding is not on Quiet Skies, she was put on the watch listing, the terrorist watch list program. So the redress process is really important. We still have that program in place. We need to have reforms, which was part of the work I've been doing and the legislation that I had that we did pass out a committee to deal with redress. But given your experience working with individuals who believe that they're on the terrorist watch list, what recommendations specifically do you have for this committee? What should we be doing right now so it doesn't happen to Mr. Crowley's wife in the future, it doesn't happen to the folks that you hear from regularly and I hear from regularly back in Michigan? Thank you for that. The redress process in DHS TRIP program is flawed. It doesn't always work. It doesn't give you the reason why you were put on the list and it doesn't give you a final decision. You fill out your information online and you get a letter back saying some vague language like we've received it, we can neither confirm nor deny that you're on a list. And it's not always effective. So we need to work to find ways to expand that due process, expand the option of being removed from the list, look at what existing programs are there. We could take advantage of which could review individuals coming in. You want to be proactive. If somebody is on the list, again, set up a proactive way for them to reach out and be removed. The, you know, we have, you know, my colleague at the end who's a U.S. Air Marshal who has far more access to being removed, still took him, you know, a couple years to be removed. So imagine a regular individual going through the same thing, it's going to take much longer. But what we've learned through our practice is when we can identify that one piece of information or that one agent that placed that piece of information in there and then have a conversation with them, interview the client, and once that piece of information is removed, then the issue is gone. But it's going to be impossible to do that for 2 million people. There's just not enough agents and resources to go around. So finding a, you know, streamlined way, a streamlined due process measure, maybe building on DHS TRIP, that should be first and foremost and drilling down the list. And then also possibly maybe going through the list to at least purge the names of folks that have died or, you know, children that are like 4 or 5 years old, right? Remove those names so it's, you're working with a cleaner set of data to begin with. Well, I've certainly heard a lot from community members about the negative experiences as you mentioned here with the screening system. But just like today's testimony, which is powerful, I appreciate the testimony, these are anecdotal accounts and we can come up with an awful lot of anecdotal accounts. But one of the recommendations in my report and a big part of my bill was requiring better and more complete data from CBP and TSA on all their screening practices, because there's like 20 plus programs. We're talking about one that's gone away. We still got a whole lot more of these things that are out there that need to be addressed. This is a big, big issue. So my question for you is, what, do you think having better data, exactly what's happening to understand whether these processes are effective and whether there's bias, intentional or not, political, whatever it may be, we need data. What's your sense of that? Absolutely. I think there should be data. We should be able to look at that list and determine why this person was added. Then at the end of the review, you'll find out, okay, were these, you know, this group of people, do we have this many individuals added because they're Trump supporters or because they're Democratic Party supporters? We need to be able to read that. We need to be able to know why they're on there, who they are, what trends and determine what mistakes are being made. Because again, it can go just depending of what administration is in office, who's going to be targeted. And, you know, our community for the past quarter century, for the past three decades or so, we're thankful enough to be targeted by all administrations. So we can tell you the experiences through Republican and Democrat administrations. But the reality is there are trends, there is bias. There are folks on that list that need to be removed. Expanding that option, expanding the way to do that and having those data points, having that data set will also help develop policies and strategies moving forward to enhance and make the security process and the screening process better. Yeah, I'd just like to follow up because this could happen in all administrations, both parties, whatever. This is a problem. We've got to make sure there's full transparency, there's oversight, regardless of who's in office. And most of the oversight in these systems currently is handled by internal DHS offices. The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, as well as inspector generals who oversee this. However, unfortunately, this administration has basically gutted all of the oversight. We don't have the oversight anymore. Can you describe the consequences of eliminating internal oversight we'll have on American civil rights and civil liberties with regard to screening and watch listing? So all of the issues that are being raised by everybody here today, we have to make sure that we're guarding against that. What are your thoughts? Look, oversight is very important. The issue was bad with a functional CRCL office at DHS. And you can imagine this would be a lot worse with no oversight. So having that office, having some sort of mechanism there is important.