An Iowa Boy Scout leader is alleging a U.S. border agent pulled out his gun and pointed it at a 15-year-old while the troop was passing through the Yukon into Alaska.

“(The Scout) gets off the van and there’s a snap of a holster and this guy’s got his gun pointed at him because he didn’t ask permission to get off the van,” Jim Fox, leader of the Boy Scout Troop 111 in Grimes, Iowa, told the Star in an interview Wednesday afternoon.

But after reviewing its surveillance footage, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has not found any proof the incident took place at the crossing near Beaver Creek.

“CBP takes any allegations of wrongdoing very seriously,” the agency said Wednesday in a release.

“CBP’s review of this group’s inspection, including video footage review, indicates that our officer did not un-holster or handle his weapon as stated in the allegation. The review revealed nothing out of the ordinary.”

The incident allegedly took place July 7 at the Alcan port of entry.

Fox and his troop of 18 boys, ages 12 to 16, were on a three-week trip across Canada and the U.S. In four vans, they travelled north – their end goal was Alaska, where the Scouts planned to turn back and head home to Iowa for July 20.

About 15 kilometres before they hit the Alaska-Yukon border, they stopped to change into their Scout uniforms.

As they pulled up to the border crossing, one of the boys took a photo.

“He was excited,” Fox said. “He was coming home. He’d already taken 1,200 pictures along the way.

“Rather than saying, ‘Hey, by the way, that’s probably not a good idea,’ (the agent) goes, ‘Stop taking pictures. Give me that camera. That’s a violation of federal law, you cannot take a pic of a federal agent or a federal building.’”

The border agent then asked the driver to pull over, and told him officers were going to “take that van apart,” Fox said.

He took the boy’s camera and began scrolling through the photos.

“He explained, ‘This is a 10-year (jail term) or 10,000 fine, and you better just sit there and wait and see what else I find on this camera,’” Fox said.

“The boys were scared.”

They brought Fox into the office and questioned why the boys had lighters and pocket knives in their bag.

“They’re Boy Scouts,” Fox told him.

As the group sat on the van, the agent asked which bag belonged to the photo-taking Scout. He wanted to search it.

One of the Scouts, a 15-year-old, got off the van to show them.

Then the agent allegedly pulled out his gun, pointed it at the teen and told him not to exit the van without permission.

“So he just gets back on the van,” Fox said. “He’s scared. He’s a 15-year-old kid. He’s never had a gun pointed at him before.”

Fox didn’t see the officer pull out his gun – he was in the office at the time – but said the Eagle Scout told him what happened. Other Scouts verified the story.

“I have a 15-year-old boy who comes to me and explains that this happened and he’s shaking,” Fox said.

“There’s no reason for him to make up a story. There’s no benefit to making up this story, and I have asked him again since we returned if this allegation was true.

“He said, ‘Jim, I’ve never lied to you before. I’m not going to start now.’”

After four hours at the border, where agents searched the van and scraped one boy’s eyeglasses case for drugs, according to Fox, the group was allowed to enter Alaska.

They had no problems crossing the Canadian border on their way back.

But Fox said the boys were nervous when it came time to cross the U.S. border again from Alberta into Montana.

“It was all I could do keep the boys from hyperventilating,” Fox said. “They were just scared to death to enter their own country.”

He wrote a post on Facebook about what happened and has heard from Iowa’s congressman and senator, who have launched an investigation, he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it had reached out to Troop 111 for more information about the allegation and referred the video footage to its internal affairs for further review.