CBP does not need a warrant to search the phones of any travelers arriving at the U.S. border, including airports, said Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco.
“The U.S. government has taken the view that they have the ability to search your devices without a warrant and without suspicion under what’s known as the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment,” she said.
Other travelers have found themselves unexpectedly detained.
Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman who was reapplying for a U.S. work visa, was detained without explanation on March 3 at the Mexican border near San Diego and spent 12 days in detention before returning home. She wrote in The Guardian that she was detained after she was questioned about the status of her visa, which had been granted following an initial rejection.
“There is no communication, you don’t have an officer to talk to,” Mooney told MSNBC last week. “You can’t contact your lawyers or your friends or your family.”
When Rebecca Burke, a backpacker from Britain, tried to enter from Canada in February, she spent nearly three weeks at a detention center. In a statement to the BBC, the Northwest ICE Processing Center said Burke was repatriated after being detained “related to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission.”
Burke’s family said it believes her detention was due to a misunderstanding about her accommodation arrangements, which were free in exchange for helping hosts with household chores and which her father says authorities may have suspected constituted employment in violation of her visa.
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