I left out of AILA (SDQ) on Mon (the 4th) at 4:40 pm and got to the airport at 3 pm and went through security fine...you'll go through the normal airport security like everyone else, however if you are US bound in our case everyone boarding AA had to go through additional security (which included a physical pat down and physical look through carry on) this is at the gate....so you do not want to delay going through the first security check and immigration since you will have to get into another line outside the gate for the 2nd checkpoint. To say the least the flight was delayed by 30 min because of the need to process the passengers through the additional security point.
You may have heard about a 4 hour processing time since the 5th probably a heavy travel day since the 4th was a national holiday.