US border agents must get warrant before searching cellphones, federal court rules

A federal district court in New York has ruled that U.S. border agents must obtain a warrant before searching the electronic devices of Americans and travelers crossing the U.S. border.

The July 24 ruling is the most recent court opinion difficult the U.S. government’s long-standing legal argument that federal border agents should have the ability to access travelers’ devices at ports of entry, comparable to airports, seaports and land borders, with out a court order.

Civil rights groups that defended the ruling praised the decision.

“The ruling makes clear that border patrol agents need a warrant before they can access what the Supreme Court has called ‘the window into a person’s life,’” said Scott Wilkens, senior counsel on the Knight First Amendment Institute, considered one of the groups that brought the case. in a press release from Friday.

The district court ruling applies to the Eastern District of New York, which incorporates New York-area airports comparable to John F. Kennedy International Airport, considered one of the most important transportation hubs within the United States.

A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency chargeable for border security, didn’t reply to a request for comment outside business hours.

The court’s ruling concerns a criminal case involving Kurbanali Sultanov, a U.S. citizen whose phone was seized by border agents at JFK Airport in 2022 and asked for a password, which Sultanov did when officers told him he had no alternative. Sultanov later moved to suppress evidence — allegedly child sexual abuse footage — taken from his phone, arguing that the search violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

The U.S. border is a legally opaque space where foreign travelers have almost no right to privacy, and Americans may also face intrusive searches. The U.S. government has unique powers and authority on the border, comparable to conducting warrantless searches of devices that law enforcement normally cannot use against someone who has entered the U.S. without first convincing a judge of sufficient suspicion to justify a search.

Critics have argued for years that such searches are unconstitutional and violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizure of an individual’s electronic devices.

In that ruling, the judge relied partly on a friend-of-the-court temporary filed on behalf of the defendants, arguing that unreasonable border searches also violate the First Amendment because they create an “unreasonably high” risk of a chilling effect on press activity and journalists’ border crossings.

The judge within the case cited a friend-of-the-court temporary filed by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, adding that the court “also shares (the groups’) concerns about the impact of warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border on other First Amendment freedoms — freedom of speech, religion, and association.”

The judge said that if the court accepted the federal government’s argument that border checks of devices don’t require any suspicion, “political opposition targets (or their colleagues, friends or families) would need to pass through an international airport only once for the government to gain unfettered access to the most ‘intimate window into a person’s life.’” The latter cited an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling on cellphone privacy.

Although the court found that the warrantless search of Sultanov’s phone was unconstitutional, it also found that the federal government acted in good faith on the time of the search and denied Sultanov’s motion to suppress evidence from his phone.

It isn’t yet known whether federal prosecutors will appeal the choice to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which incorporates New York.

According to CBP’s own dataThe Federal Border Agency carried out greater than 41,700 device checks on foreign travellers in 2023.

Lawmakers have long tried to plug a loophole in border search laws by creating laws that may require U.S. law enforcement officers to acquire a warrant to go looking devices on the border. The bipartisan laws ultimately failed, but legislators haven’t given up on ending this practice entirely.

Given that multiple federal courts have ruled on border searches lately, the query of their legality will likely find yourself before the Supreme Court if lawmakers don’t act more quickly.

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