By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-09-18 14:46:36 | Updated at 2026-09-18 20:18:04
5 hours ago
Government officers can search the cell phones of people entering the United States without a warrant or probable cause, a federal appeals court ruled on an appeal by Chinwendu Alisigwe.
“A jury found Chinwendu Alisigwe guilty of fraud offenses based on his use of fraudulent identification documents to open bank accounts using the names and Social Security numbers of real people,” Judge Steven J. Menashi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said in the opinion on Sept. 17.
“Alisigwe argues that the district court erred by denying his motion to suppress evidence obtained from two searches of his cellphone at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He argues that the searches violated the Fourth Amendment because the government did not obtain a warrant. We disagree.”
“Under our precedents, no suspicion is required before the government searches a traveler’s property at the border,” Menashi added.
“Because a cellphone is property, our precedents establish that the government does not need to have reasonable suspicion before searching a traveler’s cellphone at the border.”
A lawyer representing Alisigwe, a legal permanent resident who challenged how officers obtained evidence from his phone after he landed at an airport in New York in 2019, did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. Customs and Border Protection, whose officers searched the phone, declined to comment.
Alisigwe’s attorneys had pointed to a 2014 Supreme Court ruling in a separate case that held that searching cellphones requires a warrant, even in circumstances where a warrantless search is generally permitted, absent certain exceptions.
But that case does not implicate the exception to legal protections for border searches, according to the Second Circuit.
“Our precedent holding that the government may perform pretextual searches at the border without a warrant means that the government is not limited to searching for contraband or evidence of border offenses. That is because the government’s interest at the border is not limited to detecting physical contraband. Rather, the government has ‘broad authority to control who and what enters the country,’” Menashi wrote.
“Searching for evidence of criminality among those entering the country is an exercise of that authority.”
The First Amendment also does not limit the government’s ability to search phones at the border, he said.
Circuit Judge Eunice Lee, in a concurring opinion, agreed that neither a warrant nor probable cause is required to search a phone at the border but that such searches do require reasonable suspicion.
“A standard that permits a search of every international traveler’s cellphone without suspicion means that any person who goes on vacation or a business trip anywhere outside the country can be subject, upon their return home, to review of their medical records, financial information, personal messages, internet search and viewing habits, location tracking, and any other private information that may be contained on their cellphone through stored data, apps, or cloud connection,” Lee said.
“This unrestricted authority to search is not a carefully-crafted exception to the Fourth Amendment to address an immigration or contraband-related interest in controlling who or what comes into the country; it eliminates Fourth Amendment protections in this context.”
The Knight First Amendment Institute, based at New York’s Columbia University, was among the critics of the ruling.
Today’s decision leaves Americans’ most sensitive information open to search at the border without any suspicion at all,” Scott Wilkens, a senior counsel at the institute, said in a statement.
“Our phones hold our private thoughts and associations, photographs of our family and friends, and a log of our nearly every movement. The First Amendment should require the government to get a warrant before searching them. We’re disappointed the court declined to recognize that.”
The matter may eventually reach the Supreme Court, and it’s not clear how justices will rule, Orin Kerr, a professor at Stanford Law School, said on X.
