Returning to the U.S.? Court says agents can search your phone without a warrant
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Federal appeals court ruled officers don’t need a warrant to search phones at border.
- The 4th Circuit decision sets a binding precedent across its five-state circuit.
- The court limited warrantless searches to routine manual inspections, excluding forensic.
Federal officers don’t need a warrant to search the phones of travelers entering the country, a U.S. appellate court ruled this week.
“Border searches do not require a warrant to be reasonable. And if a border search is routine, individualized suspicion is not required either,” U.S. Circuit Judge Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. wrote in the opinion released by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit on Monday.
The published opinion sets binding precedent throughout the 4th Circuit, including North Carolina and four surrounding states, on how U.S. courts should balance constitutional protections against unreasonable searches with the federal government’s broader authority to police borders and ports of entry, such as airports.
The ruling makes the 4th Circuit the final federal appeals court to address the question, aligning it with other circuits that have already considered the constitutional challenge.
What happened at the Washington Dulles International Airport
The ruling centers on a Virginia case involving a May 2024 interaction between federal officers and Jose Alejandro Belmonte Cardozo, a U.S. citizen who arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport following a visit to Bolivia.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent asked that Belmonte Cardozo be sent for secondary inspection, because he was returning from a country with human and child sex trafficking challenges, court documents show. Belmonte Cardozo had also been listed in a report of travelers with suspicious financial data that investigators believed was indicative of child sex abuse material purchases.
In addition, Customs and Border Protection was running “a special operation” that month focusing on child sexual abuse materials, the agent testified.
Agents examine two iPhones
During the secondary search of Belmonte Cardozo’s baggage, agents found two iPhones and ordered him to provide the passcode to unlock them, which he did, according to court documents filed in the criminal case in the federal Eastern District of Virginia.
Within two minutes of tapping through one of his phones, an agent found sexually explicit photos and videos of young girls, court documents state.
“I observed approximately 50 videos that appeared to have been created on Snapchat, and which depicted three or four different minor girls between approximately 8 and 14 years old,” a special agent for the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a court filing seeking charges against Belmonte Cardozo, 31, and his arrest. The investigation found he pretended to be a teenage boy on Snapchat and convinced minor girls to send him sexually explicit images and videos, states a media release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Belmonte Cardozo pleaded guilty to 10 federal charges, including coercing a minor to engage in sexual activity, transporting and possessing child pornography.
He was sentenced to 18 years in prison, followed by 25 years of supervised release.
Belmonte Cardozo argues search violated constitutional rights
In his appeal to the 4th Circuit, Belmonte Cardozo argued that the manual search wasn’t routine because iPhone search features provide essentially the same access as a forensic search, which the court considers more intrusive and requires a higher level of suspicion.
Multiple civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, filed briefs supporting his argument.
A brief filed by the committee and the institute argued that warrantless phone searches infringe on travelers’ Fourth Amendment privacy rights. It also argued the searches threaten First Amendment fee speech and association protection, noting that border searches of journalists could reveal sensitive newsgathering information, including the names of confidential sources.
What the 4th Circuit said about border searches
The opinion explored how the Fourth Amendment generally requires local and state officers to obtain a warrant before conducting a phone search, with several exceptions that judges use to balance privacy rights against law enforcement’s interests.
However, this case involved a border search at an airport, one of the U.S.’s 300 ports of entry, and federal laws that give U.S. officials “broad authority to conduct routine searches and seizures without probable cause or a warrant,” the opinion states.
The broad authority was initially granted to allow federal agents to collect customs duties on goods and prevent contraband from entering the U.S., but now supports a more complex mission of screening foreign visitors, returning citizens and imported cargo.
“Unless exempt by diplomatic status, all persons entering the United States, including U.S. citizens, are subject to examination and search,” by Customs and Border Protection officers, the agency states on its website.
The 4th Circuit reached a similar conclusion, writing that “the balance of these expectations against the government’s heightened interests at the border justifies the border search exception,” the decision states.
The judges then addressed where that broad authority ends.
The court said warrantless searches are limited to routine searches, which don’t include the more intrusive forensic searches that involve extracting data from cell phones.
“Were the government to devote the manpower and time needed to conduct lengthy manual searches in a way that would deprive an individual of their phone for extended periods of time, other Fourth Amendment principles may come into play,” the opinion states.
This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 2:05 PM.
