NEW YORK — Already missing their flight to Canada, Zainab Merchant held her then 6-month-old baby inside a cold room in an airport in September of 2016 while she waited for her husband's screening to be over after her family was detained for a random security check by Transportation Security Administration agents.
"At that moment, I honestly feared for us, because when I think the three-hour mark hit, you're just sitting there waiting," Merchant told ABC News."We don't know what's going on with us. I just remember being very fearful about what was going on. It's a few officers and yourself, and nobody is there. No other person was there with us. So just [a] very lonely, cold, dark experience.
"[Since the Canada trip], we had always been detained, we'd always been questioned and it stopped being random when you knew that every time you travel, my entire family, including the children, were asked to step aside, escorted by the TSA officers," she said."It just ended up becoming this traumatic thing for us to ever fly again."
"They were being treated as criminals, no matter how little they were. It wasn't just my husband and I. They were also screening these little children," she said. "I said, 'absolutely not. You know, I'm a mom. I'm not a spy. I don't care if I'm going to be on this [a long time]. I'm just not going to do this,'" Merchant said.
"I said my final prayers as a Muslim … I had nowhere [to go], no one to call and no one to say anything to stop feeling of utter helplessness. I was ready to die. They removed my pants and they saw the blood everywhere. And they quickly just scurried out of the closet."
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