TSA Makes 82-Year-Old Breast Cancer Survivor Remove Her Prostheses

And she’s not the only one — there are 26 complaints on behalf of the elderly and people with disabilities who claim to have been abused by TSA agents at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport.

The Arizona Republic was able to find the TSA complaints using the Freedom of Information Act, and some of the stories are absolutely awful. For example, an 82-year-old woman in a wheelchair was going through security on her way to London when the metal detector beeped over her chest. She explained that she has a prosthesis and the TSA agents took some pretty harsh and invasive next steps:

Transportation Security Administration agents take the woman to a room and order her to take off her blouse. Then her bra. Then her prosthesis, which they examine. The elderly woman strips to her waist, with nothing to hide her scars.

“At her age and physical capability she posed absolutely no risk whatsoever to anyone’s safety and should not have been subjected to such invasive and (undignified) treatment,” the woman’s grandchild wrote in a formal complaint. “This sort of degrading treatment is more appropriate for prisoners.”

The other stories — a Marine who’d lost both his legs in an Afghanistan bomb attack said he was asked to stand up on his artificial legs to pass through the full-body scanner; a woman wrote that an agent ordered a pat down of her prosthetic breast and refused to conduct the search in private — are equally horrifying.

Most troubling, The Arizona Republic found that the TSA often didn’t respond to complaints, and when they did it was with a form letter. The cases were labeled “closed”.