SCOTUS case seeks to end warrantless phone searches at the border

The Fourth Amendment says authorities can’t search you or your things without probable cause and a warrant. But U.S. immigration authorities have long claimed that this constitutional mandate doesn’t apply to them, at least not when it comes to searching people—including American citizens—who are entering or exiting the United States.

Under current Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policies, agents are allowed to seize and search your stuff—including your cellphone, your laptop, or any other electronic devices—without a warrant and without suspicion if you’re around the border or flying into or out of the country.

It happened to George Anibowei five times. Now, he’s asking for the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

Anibowei is an immigration lawyer and a naturalized U.S. citizen. He lives in Dallas and frequently travels internationally, including to visit family members in Nigeria several times per year.

In October 2016, border agents stopped him at the airport as he was flying back from Toronto, took his phone, and copied everything on it before letting him go. “Nearly a decade later, the government still has that data,” according to the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which is representing Anibowei.

Since that 2016 search, immigration authorities have conducted warrantless searches of Anibowei’s phone four more times. “Every search has taken between two and five hours, resulting in delays and missed flights,” PLF reports. And every search has potentially exposed confidential information about his clients and his work as an immigration attorney to immigration enforcement authorities.

Is this constitutional? Federal courts have disagreed.

“Two federal circuits hold that a warrant is generally required at the border, while six—including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, where Anibowei brought his case—hold that a warrant is never required,” notes PLF. “Today, a traveler’s Fourth Amendment rights turn on which port of entry they happen to use.”

That’s why PLF and Anibowei are asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on “whether the Fourth Amendment permits border agents to search the digital contents of a traveler’s cell phone without a warrant.” Should the Supreme Court take up the case, it could affect numerous travelers.

The number of electronic device searches conducted by CBP has been steadily rising. Last year, it conducted 55,318 border searches of electronic devices, including 13,590 searches involving American citizens. And this comes in addition to electronic device searches conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which also claims a right to search phones and computers without warrants or probable cause.

Anibowei is challenging both CBP and ICE policies “that authorize border agents to search travelers’ electronic devices without a warrant—and, for so-called ‘basic’
or ‘manual’ searches, without any individualized suspicion,” policies that “permit agents to examine the digital contents of a traveler’s cell phone, including messages, photographs, emails, and other private information” for any (or no) reason at all.

“The border is not a Constitution-free zone,” said Texas Civil Rights Project lawyer Kassandra Gonzalez. “Travelers, including attorneys like Mr. Anibowei, have been forced to surrender their digital privacy at the customs line. We are asking the Supreme Court to ensure that the same warrant protections apply to every American, regardless of which port of entry they use.”

Ohio age verification paused, again. Earlier this summer, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit said Ohio could start to enforce a law requiring social media companies to ban people under age 16 unless they submitted a parental permission slip. Now, the 6th Circuit has at least temporarily revoked that green light. In an August 17 ruling, it granted NetChoice’s motion to halt the earlier ruling while the tech industry trade group prepares a petition for the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We are glad the Sixth Circuit recognized what’s at stake and preserved the status quo—where access to lawful speech is not subject to government-imposed barriers,” said Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center. “Today’s order preserves Ohioans’ First Amendment rights and allows NetChoice time to petition the Supreme Court for review.…We remain confident the law will ultimately be struck down.”

“A pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim.” A near-total ban on abortions in Idaho is unconstitutional, says U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill. And doctors who perform abortions on women whose health is endangered by continuing a pregnancy can’t be prosecuted, he said. More from the Associated Press:

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill made the ruling Thursday, writing that Idaho’s “Defense of Life Act” and “Fetal Heartbeat Act” — which together create a near-total ban on abortion — violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Physicians who violate the laws can lose their license and face up to five years in prison.

[…] The case isn’t about bodily autonomy or reproductive choice, Winmill wrote in the 81-page decision, but rather the “limit of the state’s power to make a woman suffer for the sake of an unborn child.”

The state can’t pick and choose which life-threatening conditions justify abortion, he wrote.

“A pregnant woman’s health is not a state resource to be allocated at the legislature’s whim,” Winmill wrote.

Stop saying social media “harms.” If you oppose age-verification laws and bans on minors using social media, you should stop adopting the language and rhetoric of proponents of these bans, psychology professor Chris Ferguson suggests:

It’s dicey for several reasons.

• “Harms” is both vague and causal. Exactly what are we talking about? In some areas, increasingly evidence suggests time spent on social media is neither correlated nor causally associated with youth mental health. According to CDC data, youth mental health has now been improving for years (though many people have blithely ignored this despite pointing to mental health data in the past). Bullying went down, not up, during the social media era even with cyberbullying factored in according to National Center for Education Statistics data. That doesn’t mean there are no reasonable concerns…are we talking about adult content slipping into child feeds, or catfishing, or poor content moderation of harassment and threats (all legitimate concerns)? Just saying “harms” leaves it to the reader to imagine what you mean, and often their suppositions won’t be evidence based.
• “Harms” is also highly emotive language. It’s unlikely to convince people to be less inclined to endorse highly restrictive approaches to “protect the children.”
• It still makes it sound like social media is a major issue for youth though the data suggests that, even with a few reasonable concerns, social media really just isn’t. The pressing problems for youth remain families in distress and dysfunctional schools. Mike Males has been banging this drum with good CDC data, but people just aren’t listening to the degree they should.
• Ultimately the “harm” language feeds directly into the narrative of people pushing for bans, not detracts from it. To do that we need to be clearer.

Read the rest here.

Last week I posted a new paper with Patrick Norrick: “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World.”

We chose the title deliberately. No society in history has experienced the fertility levels now seen in South Korea, China, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, and many other… pic.twitter.com/c6MNDfCeyK

— Jesús Fernández-Villaverde (@JesusFerna7026) August 18, 2026

• “Advertising’s oldest rule is simple: Know your audience. In California, following it may get an online platform sued,” reports Ben Sperry of the International Center for Law & Economics:

Show retirement-home ads to seniors and student discounts to college students, and sensible targeting can suddenly look like unlawful discrimination.

That question is now before California’s Sixth Appellate District. The dispute arises from a trial court ruling in Haynie v. Google that could turn routine age-based ad targeting into a violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.

• A bill to decriminalize sex work in South Africa is headed back to the country’s Parliament.

• France’s highest court has concerns about the country’s proposed social media ban. Last Friday, “France’s Constitutional Council ruled that a proposed social media ban for children under the age of 15 would ‘disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication,'” Reason‘s Meagan O’Rourke reports. “The bill, which would have also barred high school students from using phones in school, passed both chambers of France’s Parliament in July.”