Amid the recent news of a U.S. citizen being asked to turn over his phone to authorities at a border crossing, Sophia Cope of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has tips on digital civil liberties.
Related, “Attorney representing a student protester detained by federal immigration agents”
When a man in Michigan was heading home on Sunday from a family vacation in the Caribbean, he was stopped in the Detroit Airport. Federal officers, border agents, detained him, interrogated him and pressured him to hand over his cellphone. The man is a U.S. citizen. He’s a civil rights and criminal defense attorney, and among his clients is an activist who has been charged in connection to a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Michigan.
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250410185452/https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5357455
I’m not sure I’m understanding your question. The prior poster you’re responding to said to use a burner phone. So you have a phone. It looks like you’re asking: “If I get stuck in another country and can’t come back, how do I get the device (your primary phone) I left in the USA?”
Is that what you’re asking?
Yes.
Me personally, if I was stuck in another country I didn’t plan on being in long term, getting a phone back I spent a few hundred dollars on probably wouldn’t be very high on my list.
If your concern is not being parted from your primary phone because of its replacement cost, you could backup you data to the cloud on your primary phone, wipe it clean, then carry it across the border (not hiding it). If there’s nothing on it then if they ask for it they would likely hand it back to you fairly quickly when they see there’s nothing to snoop on it.
Alternatively, prior to your departure, mail it to your new location in the other country. I’d still wipe the data before mailing it though.