The Ruling
On July 13, 2026, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held in United States v. Belmonte Cardozo that a Customs and Border Protection officer's manual, by-hand search of a traveler's phone at a U.S. port of entry is a "routine" border search requiring no warrant and no individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. The case arose after a CBP officer at Washington Dulles International Airport asked Jose Belmonte Cardozo, arriving from Bolivia, to unlock his two iPhones; within roughly two minutes of scrolling through the photo galleries — including a hidden folder — the officer found child sexual abuse material. Belmonte Cardozo was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison; on appeal he argued the warrantless search violated the Fourth Amendment.
Writing for the panel, Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. preserved a distinction the circuit first drew in 2018: manual device searches are "routine" and suspicionless, while forensic searches — those using specialized software to image, extract, or reconstruct a device's contents, including deleted files — are "nonroutine" and require at least individualized suspicion (United States v. Kolsuz, 890 F.3d 133 (4th Cir. 2018)). Because the officer scrolled the phone by hand rather than plugging it into a forensic tool, the court held the ordinary, suspicion-free border search exception applied in full.
EFF's Rejected Argument
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, joined by the national ACLU, four state ACLU affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, filed an amicus brief urging the Fourth Circuit to abandon the manual/forensic line and require a warrant backed by probable cause for any search of a phone's digital contents at the border. The brief leaned on the Supreme Court's 2014 decision in Riley v. California, which held that cell phones hold "the sum of an individual's private life" and cannot be searched incident to arrest without a warrant precisely because of the volume and sensitivity of the data they contain — reasoning EFF argued applies regardless of which tool an officer uses to access that data. The panel disagreed, treating a manual scroll as categorically less invasive than a forensic extraction that copies a device wholesale.
Steelmanning the Border Search Exception
The government's position is not frivolous. Courts have long recognized that the border carries reduced privacy expectations because sovereign nations have a near-absolute interest in controlling what — and who — crosses their territory, an interest older than the Fourth Amendment itself. CBP processes an enormous volume of international arrivals, and requiring a warrant for every phone glance would functionally end walk-through screening at ports of entry, substituting case-by-case judicial process CBP is not staffed to support. A two-minute look at a photo gallery is, on its face, a different order of intrusion than shipping a phone to a forensic lab for a bit-by-bit extraction that can recover deleted messages and location histories months later. The facts of Belmonte Cardozo illustrate the stakes on the other side of the ledger: a fast, suspicionless look at an unlocked phone is exactly what caught someone carrying child sexual abuse material across an international border.
Why the Line Is Eroding
But the manual/forensic distinction was drawn for phones with far less to see. In 2026, "manual" access to an unlocked iPhone reaches the same photo libraries, message threads, cloud-synced documents, and financial apps that a forensic tool would extract — an officer just navigates it with a thumb instead of a cable. The Belmonte Cardozo search itself proves the point: two minutes of manual scrolling reached a hidden folder. Riley's core insight — that phones are different in kind, not degree, because of what they aggregate — does not obviously track a line drawn by which button the officer presses.
That gap is showing up in the numbers. CBP searched 55,318 devices at ports of entry in fiscal year 2025, a record and a 17.6% jump over FY2024; nearly all of the growth is in suspicionless "basic" (manual) searches, which rose from about 42,725 to 50,922 over the same period. Searches of U.S. citizens' own devices — travelers with no diminished-sovereignty rationale for CBP to invoke beyond re-entry itself — climbed to 13,590 in FY2025. The ruling also sits inside a live, unresolved circuit split: the Ninth Circuit's United States v. Cano (2019) limited suspicionless border device searches to those genuinely aimed at contraband, while the Eleventh Circuit's United States v. Touset (2018) rejected any suspicion requirement even for forensic searches — exactly the kind of division the Supreme Court eventually steps in to resolve.
The Proportionate Fix
People of Internet's position is not that CBP should lose the ability to inspect devices for contraband at the border — that is a legitimate government function that survives even under Riley. But treating a suspicionless glance at a modern smartphone as categorically different from a forensic download asks judges to police a distinction that is disappearing as fast as phones get more capable. A workable middle path — one several circuits have already reached for — would tie any content search of a phone, manual or forensic, to reasonable suspicion of a border-related offense, while leaving CBP free to inspect the device itself (is it what it claims to be, does it conceal a physical threat) without any suspicion at all. That standard would preserve CBP's core border function without treating every international traveler's photo library as fair game by default. Until the Supreme Court resolves the split Belmonte Cardozo deepens, the constitutional protection your phone gets at the border will keep depending on which circuit you happen to land in.