Stop Patting Down My 8-Year-Old

Michael Winston Hicks—Mikey to his mom—is 8 years old, and because he shares his name with some shady character, he gets hassled whenever he tries to fly. At age two, Mikey was patted down at Newark Airport. According to The New York Times, he cried. “Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch—someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Hicks's mother said of one bad trip to the airport. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.” In the last three years alone, more than 80,000 people have asked to be removed from the watch list.