Is it illegal to trick the US government into wiping your phone during a questionable legal search?
A Georgia man has been charged with wiping his phone while being questioned by Customs and Border Protection. Samuel Tunick has something in common with others whose devices have been searched at airports: He was an activist.
Unlike others whose phones were taken without explanation, Tunick was told that CBP needed to search his device to determine if it contained child sexual abuse material, according to court documents. But Tunick’s lawyers argued that the search was “a pretext for a fishing trip” in his connection to the Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta, where dozens of people were charged under the state’s RICO laws, which were later overturned. Several protesters are still facing domestic terrorism and arson charges.
According to a motion to suppress evidence filed in March, Tunick refused to consent to the search and repeatedly asked to speak to his attorney, but CBP officers told him they did not need a warrant to search his phone. Tunick eventually gave the agents the password on his phone, but when they entered it, “the screen went blank, flashed repeatedly and the phone appeared to restart,” court records said. Prosecutors allege that Tunick used the GrapheneOS “diress password” to wipe his phone, then deleted evidence.
Travelers’ devices have come under increased scrutiny since Donald Trump’s return to office – and courts disagree on the legality of warrantless searches. As a result, travelers have little clarity about how their rights apply at airports and other points of entry. This gray area has allowed the Department of Public Safety to target people suspected of criticizing the president or the policies of his administration.
The confusion comes from the combination of government decisions. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled United States v. Payne that law enforcement can forcefully unlock a person’s device with their fingerprint, facial recognition, or other biometric identifiers without violating the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. But people cannot be forced to give or enter their passcodes, as it is a form of “proof” of proof — information that requires a person to reveal their thoughts.
Those decisions, however, were not issued with airports in mind, and CBP says the Constitution does not apply to ports of entry. Judicial opinion is mixed on that, too. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals — which oversees federal courts in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia — recently ruled that border agents do not need a warrant to search travelers’ phones. (More advanced searches, however, require a warrant.) A separate appeals court whose jurisdiction includes Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico has ruled that agents can do the manual. again warrantless forensic search. Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York ruled that CBP agents cannot conduct searches of the device without a warrant.
Tunick’s case has similar details to the one that led to the New York ruling. The New York case began with the criminal investigation of Kurbonali Sultanov, a naturalized citizen from Uzbekistan whose name triggered an alert on the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, which identified him as a potential buyer of child sexual abuse material. In court, Sultanov said the agents told him there was nothing he could do but open his phone. He was also questioned by agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, who read Sultanov his Miranda rights, which he said he understood “50/50,” before questioning him.
It is unclear why CBP agents believed Tunick had child sexual abuse material on his phone. The two-page lawsuit filed in Georgia federal court made no mention of it, and CBP did not respond The Vergerequest for comment.
“Under the Fourth Amendment, there must be a warrant, or at least, a specific suspicion that there is an illegal digital transaction on the phone,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said. The Verge. “Agents should never be allowed to conduct warrantless searches on behalf of domestic law enforcement agents who simply want to avoid the general Fourth Amendment requirement to obtain a warrant.”
Allegations that immigration agents are surveillance activists have a lot of foundation. In a lawsuit filed in Minnesota federal court, a Minneapolis labor activist said CBP was conducting “systematic” searches of activists’ vehicles, using the fight against terrorism as an excuse to target the president’s left-wing critics. In March, more than a dozen members of an aid convoy to Cuba had their phones confiscated at Miami International Airport.
Phone inspections at ports of entry are still relatively rare: CBP searched 55,318 phones and other electronic devices during fiscal year 2025, a 32 percent increase from 2023. (The US had more than 5 million international visitors in June 2025 alone, a figure that does not include US citizens.) he’s focused on hitting the left field in his second term.
Last September, Trump issued an executive order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization, although there is no single organized group known as antifa. In June, a Texas federal judge sentenced eight activists to more than 30 years in prison for allegedly being “in Antifa custody.” The State Department recently released a 100-page report that says several left-wing groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America, CODEPINK, and others were “front groups and renegades” for the Cuban government. The report says Cuba has influenced civil society in the US, including the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and tied the Standing Rock and Cop City protests to “Antifa.”
As Trump’s attacks on the left continue, activists traveling internationally may find themselves under increased scrutiny at airports and other ports of entry. Although US citizens cannot be barred from entering the country, CBP can take their tools and try to break into them with advanced forensic tools. To prevent government agents from accessing your phone’s contents, privacy experts suggest backing up and wiping your device — before on the go, not during the interrogation.
William Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explained that “a judge is unlikely to look favorably on the use of an oppressive password.” The EFF warns against wiping the contents of your device during quizzes, as Tunick allegedly did. “Resetting your device to factory settings at your own time is within your rights.”
