Border agents can search your phone with no warrant or suspicion. A Texas lawyer searched five times wants the Supreme Court to step in.

George Anibowei, a Texas-based immigration attorney, has had his phone searched by federal agents at the border on five separate occasions, Reason reports, and he is asking the Supreme Court to decide whether the Fourth Amendment allows it. Under the border search exception, agents may seize and search property, including phones and other electronic devices, with no warrant and no suspicion, and federal courts have extended that exception to the contents of a person's phone. The Court turned away his first petition in 2024. This time he has company. An amicus brief from the Cato Institute argues that what began as a "narrow constitutional exception" now "threatens to swallow the protection it was meant only to qualify." The Rutherford Institute says the government has "repeatedly used the exception as a tool to violate Americans' civil liberties." The American Bar Association warns such searches can "threaten attorneys' important ethical duty of confidentiality and the attorney-client privilege." Anibowei's lawyer, Amy Peikoff of the Pacific Legal Foundation, calls it a "trespass on your papers when the government searches the contents of your cellphone without a warrant," and notes that most people keep as much information on their phones as in their homes. In Riley v. California in 2014, the justices rejected the government's argument that searching all the data on a phone is "materially indistinguishable" from searching physical items. To be fair, every nation has a sovereign right to control what crosses its border, which is why the exception exists, and agents should be able to inspect luggage. But my standard doesn't change with the party in power: a phone holds your medical records, your finances, your photos and, for a lawyer, other people's secrets. That is not a suitcase. My view: the Court should take this case and require a warrant before agents go through the digital contents of Americans' phones at the border.