What the Court Held
On July 13, 2026, the Fourth Circuit ruled in United States v. Belmonte Cardozo (No. 25-4239) that a border officer's manual, by-hand search of a traveler's phone is a "routine" border search that requires neither a warrant nor individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. The case arose after a U.S. citizen returning through Dulles International Airport from Bolivia was flagged for secondary inspection; a roughly two-minute manual review of his phone turned up child sexual abuse material. The Fourth Circuit affirmed, holding that manual searches remain categorically different from forensic searches — the kind that use extraction software to pull deleted files, metadata, and cached fragments — which the court's own precedent in United States v. Kolsuz (2018) and United States v. Aigbekaen (2019) still requires "some measure of individualized suspicion" to justify (EFF).
The court's reasoning rests on a four-part distinction: a human officer versus extraction software, a search bounded by an officer's time and patience versus a comprehensive automated one, content a user would normally see versus deleted or hidden data, and an officer's fallible memory versus a permanent forensic record. The opinion leans hard on the fact that the search here took about two minutes — treating brevity itself as evidence of a lighter privacy intrusion (Fourth Circuit opinion).
A Split That Was Already There, Now Sharper
The ruling is binding across the Fourth Circuit's five states (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina) and lands atop an already fractured landscape. The Eleventh Circuit's 2018 decision in United States v. Touset rejected the routine/non-routine framework for electronics entirely, holding that agents need no suspicion for either manual or forensic searches. The Fourth and Ninth Circuits, by contrast, require at least reasonable suspicion before agents can run forensic extraction tools — though the Ninth Circuit's United States v. Cano further narrowed that suspicion to searches for digital contraband specifically (Crowell & Moring). Belmonte Cardozo doesn't resolve any of that; it adds a fresh, closely reasoned articulation of the manual/forensic line to a body of law that already disagrees about whether that line should exist at all. That is the textbook setup for certiorari, but the Supreme Court has passed on this question before, and nothing here forces its hand.
The Case for the Rule
The government's position deserves a fair hearing, not a caricature. Every year U.S. Customs and Border Protection processes an enormous volume of international travelers, and border searches have operated under a reduced-suspicion standard since long before smartphones existed — the sovereign's interest in inspecting what crosses its border is old and well established. CBP's own enforcement data shows the manual-search regime is not a rubber stamp for constant surveillance: agencies reported 55,318 total electronic device searches in fiscal year 2025, of which 50,922 were basic manual searches, out of hundreds of millions of border crossings that year — a small fraction of travelers, concentrated on those already flagged for secondary inspection (Immigration Policy Tracking Project, citing CBP data). And in this specific case, the reduced-suspicion manual search is what surfaced CSAM — a genuinely hard fact for anyone arguing the rule produces no public-safety value.
Why the Line Doesn't Hold
But the Fourth Circuit's own reasoning undercuts its result. A phone is not luggage. The Supreme Court said as much in Riley v. California (2014), holding that police need a warrant to search a phone seized incident to arrest precisely because a phone's storage capacity and scope — photos, messages, location history, financial records, medical apps — makes it categorically unlike anything a border officer could historically flip through by hand. A modern smartphone's manually accessible content is already the forensic search of a decade ago: contacts, years of messages, cloud-synced photos, browsing history. Treating the mechanism of the intrusion (finger versus forensic tool) rather than the scope of what is exposed as the constitutional dividing line is a distinction that made more sense for a wallet than for a phone.
The practical result is a Fourth Amendment that depends on which port of entry a traveler happens to land at — a citizen returning through Dulles gets one rule, the same citizen through Atlanta or a Ninth Circuit airport gets another. That is not proportionate regulation; it is regulatory noise dressed up as doctrine, and it does little to advance the government's legitimate interest in stopping contraband or CSAM, both of which manual search authority already reaches. A cleaner, more administrable rule — reasonable suspicion for any device search, manual or forensic, with a narrow and clearly defined emergency exception — would preserve CBP's ability to act on genuine red flags like Belmonte Cardozo's own secondary-inspection flag, while ending the current patchwork where privacy protection is a function of geography rather than principle. Congress or the Supreme Court, not five more years of circuit-by-circuit line-drawing, is the right venue to fix that.