Your Phone Isn’t Safe at the Border. Warrantless Phone Searches Hit Record High.

You’ve landed in the United States, jet-lagged and maybe still trying to remember if you left your charger in the seatback pocket. But before you even hit the bathrooms at JFK, a smiling agent from Customs and Border Protection may have one small request: your phone. Not to help you find a ride, of course. They want to scroll through it.

And scroll they do. Between April and June 2025, CBP agents rummaged through the digital drawers of 14,899 travelers, setting a new record in the long-running TSA Theater production of Security First, Rights Later.

Of course, the CBP says it's all very normal. On their website, they whisper soothingly that only “less than 0.01 percent” of travelers ever experience one of these searches. That’s supposed to make you feel better. You know, like when the IRS says they audit “less than 1 percent” of Americans, so it’s fine if they comb through your Venmo to find that one time you split a pizza with a freelancer who later wrote an anti-tax op-ed.

What’s happening at the US border is a full surveillance sprint, with all the subtlety of a TSA officer throwing your toothpaste in the trash. CBP doesn’t need a warrant to search your phone. They don’t need suspicion. All they need is your physical presence and the kind of glum, uniformed authority that says, “This’ll go easier if you cooperate.”

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