Customs and Border Protection personnel searched more than 55,000 phones, laptops, and tablets at the border last year, a number that has climbed sixfold since 2015, even though it still touches only a small fraction of the more than 400 million travelers the agency processed. Most of those searches turn up nothing more interesting than vacation photos. Samuel Tunick’s did not go that smoothly.
A federal grand jury in Atlanta indicted him in November 2025 for a crime most people didn’t know existed: erasing his own phone. Border agents pulled him into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in January 2025, as he came home from vacation, and asked for his passcode. He gave them one. The screen went blank, flashed, and restarted. He’d entered a duress code built into his phone’s privacy software, and it wiped the device clean. Prosecutors say that’s a federal crime, destroying property to prevent its lawful seizure, and it carries up to five years in prison.
Tunick is an activist tied to the Stop Cop City movement, and I doubt we’d agree on much. But the Fourth Amendment doesn’t come with a partisan filter, and what happened to him at that airport should trouble conservatives who believe in property rights and a government that answers to a judge before it rummages through your life, as much as it troubles the American Civil Liberties Union.
The problem starts with the border search exception. Since the early republic, courts have let federal agents search your luggage, your car, your suitcase, without a warrant and without a shred of suspicion. That rule made sense when officers were counting bottles of French wine. Your phone is not a suitcase. It holds your bank statements, your privileged correspondence, and your child’s location history, the sum of a life nobody hands over voluntarily.
The Supreme Court noticed the difference back in 2014. In Riley v. California, a unanimous court held that police need a warrant to search a phone seized during an arrest, because a modern phone holds what the court called the privacies of life, and treating it like a wallet is closer to comparing a horseback ride to a flight to the moon. Four years later, in Carpenter v. United States, the court applied the same logic to cellphone location records, requiring a warrant even for data held by a third party.
None of that logic has made it to the border yet. In United States v. Vergara, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers Georgia and therefore Tunick’s case, held that agents can run a full forensic search of your phone with no suspicion whatsoever. The 1st Circuit inched toward requiring reasonable suspicion for forensic searches in Alasaad v. Mayorkas, and the 9th Circuit landed somewhere similar. The Supreme Court has ducked the question for a decade now. Your Fourth Amendment rights, in practice, depend on which airport you land at.
To be sure, the government’s interest at the border is real. A sovereign nation gets to control who and what crosses its line, and most CBP officers aren’t spending their shifts hunting for excuses to read your diary. The overwhelming majority of travelers sail through without a second look.
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But small doesn’t mean harmless, and the trend hasn’t leveled off. CBP now runs more than 1,000 full forensic device searches every quarter, the kind that copy your entire digital life onto a government hard drive. A search that happens rarely is still a search the Founding Fathers would call unreasonable, because reasonableness was never supposed to depend on how many other people the government left alone that day.
Congress could fix this tomorrow by requiring reasonable suspicion for any device search at the border, manual or forensic. The Supreme Court could settle the circuit split it’s been avoiding since Riley came down. Until one of those happens, don’t assume your citizenship protects you at the jet bridge. It doesn’t. Travel light, encrypt what actually matters, and remember this: The same government that needs a warrant to open your mail apparently needs nothing at all to open your phone, so long as it catches you at customs first.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Pennsylvania; and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.