A two-minute search, no warrant required
On July 13, 2026, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo (No. 25-4239) that border agents may manually search a traveler's cell phone without a warrant or any individualized suspicion. Jose Belmonte Cardozo, a U.S. citizen, was stopped at Washington Dulles International Airport returning from Bolivia. An officer asked him to unlock his two iPhones; within about two minutes of scrolling, the officer found child sexual abuse material in a hidden photo folder. Belmonte Cardozo entered a conditional guilty plea preserving his right to appeal the denial of his suppression motion, and was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The panel, in an opinion by Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr., upheld the search as a routine border search requiring no suspicion at all.
The line the court drew
The ruling did not erase Fourth Amendment scrutiny at the border — it confirmed where the line sits. The Fourth Circuit's own precedents, United States v. Kolsuz (2018) and United States v. Aigbekaen (2019), already held that forensic searches — plugging a device into software that extracts deleted files, cached data, and metadata — are "nonroutine" and require reasonable suspicion of a transnational offense. Belmonte Cardozo asked the court to extend that same suspicion requirement to manual searches. The panel declined, citing four distinctions: a person searches manually, not a machine; the search's breadth is capped by an officer's time and patience rather than being exhaustive; a manual search reveals only what the phone's owner could normally access, not deleted or hidden system data; and it depends on an officer's memory and notes rather than a preserved forensic record.
Steelman: why courts keep the line where it is
The government's position deserves fair treatment. Border search authority under 19 U.S.C. § 1581 and the accompanying "border search exception" reflects a genuinely old sovereignty interest — screening what and who crosses into the country — that predates digital devices entirely. A two-minute visual check is categorically less invasive than a forensic download that can reconstruct a person's entire digital life, including things they thought they'd deleted. And the facts of this case are not abstract: a fast manual look caught concealed contraband immediately, without extended device retention or an off-site forensic exam. Requiring a warrant, or even reasonable suspicion, for every phone glance at primary inspection could slow processing across the roughly 400 million border crossings CBP handles each year — a real administrative cost regulators are entitled to weigh.
Where the numbers cut against complacency
That administrability argument gets harder to sustain once you look at where enforcement volume is actually going. CBP conducted 55,318 electronic device searches in fiscal year 2025, up roughly 18% from fiscal 2024, according to CBP data reported by the Immigration Policy Tracking Project. Nearly all of that growth sits in the "basic" manual-search category the Fourth Circuit just confirmed needs no suspicion whatsoever: basic searches rose from 42,725 to 50,922 year over year, while advanced forensic searches — the ones still requiring suspicion — barely moved, from 4,322 to 4,396. U.S. citizen device searches climbed to 13,590. In other words, the enforcement growth is concentrating almost entirely in the one search category that sits outside constitutional review. A modern "manual" scroll-through already surfaces years of messages, contacts, saved credentials, and health and location data synced from the cloud — precisely the kind of comprehensive, "otherwise separate and disconnected" personal record the Supreme Court called uniquely sensitive in Riley v. California (2014), when it required a warrant to search a phone incident to arrest everywhere except the border.
An unsettled, and now wider, circuit landscape
EFF, joined by ACLU affiliates in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, the national ACLU, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, filed an amicus brief urging the Fourth Circuit to require a warrant for both manual and forensic device searches, arguing the process "is not unduly burdensome" and that officers could hold a device while a warrant is sought.
The court rejected that argument. The First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits require reasonable suspicion for forensic border searches; the Eleventh Circuit requires none for either search type. No circuit yet requires suspicion for manual searches — Belmonte Cardozo simply confirmed that consensus in the Fourth Circuit rather than breaking from it. That leaves the manual/forensic distinction as the only meaningful dividing line nationally, and it is a distinction of enforcement method, not of the sensitivity of the data actually exposed.
Our take
The border search exception itself is not the problem, and a categorical, judicially administrable rule for routine screening is more workable than requiring a warrant for every crossing. But treating a "manual" search of a modern smartphone as equivalent in privacy stakes to a 1970s glance inside a suitcase is no longer defensible on the facts — a phone's home screen alone can expose more personal information than a forensic search of a device from a decade ago. The proportionate fix isn't abolishing the exception; it's tightening it. CBP, or Congress through something like the previously proposed Protecting Data at the Border Act, should write hard limits directly into policy: a capped search duration, mandatory logging of what was viewed, and an opt-out preserving attorney-client or other privileged professional data. Absent that, "routine" is doing a lot of quiet work to keep an ever-larger share of warrantless searches outside the Fourth Amendment's reach — and the growth is happening exactly there.