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
This all assumes you’re a US citizen. While technically it applies to all people, the current administration has had no blowback for consistently ignoring these laws for non-citizens.
Best thing you can do if you absolutely need to take your phone across the border (eg, you need your MFA) is to remove any biometrics, change the password, turn the phone off, and if ordered to enter the password, honestly say that you changed it just before traveling and have now forgotten it.
Personally, I find it easier not to travel to/through the US than to buy a burner or wipe/restore my device (I’m not going to stick my data on cloud backup).
Correct. US citizens have an absolute right to enter the country. So if they want to detain for more than several hours, they have to come up with criminal charges.
Permanent residents theoretically enjoy some constitutional rights at the border, but you all have seen what the current situation is
Non-citizen non-LPRs can simply be refused admission and summarily deported on much flimsier grounds than any of this stuff we’re talking about.