Border agents in the United States are inspecting travelers' phones and laptops more often, according to a Golem report published this week on device searches at US ports of entry.
The legal machinery has not changed. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on the 'border search exception,' a doctrine holding that searches at the border need neither a warrant nor probable cause. Courts have generally accepted 'basic' searches on that basis — an officer scrolling through photos, messages and apps. 'Advanced' searches, in which a device's contents are copied for forensic analysis off-site, have drawn more litigation but continue in practice. What the report describes is a change in frequency, not in law.
CBP's own published figures have shown electronic device inspections rising over the past several years. The overwhelming majority are basic; a small share go to forensic extraction. The agency does not publish why individual travelers are selected, so the trend is visible mainly in aggregate numbers and in travelers' accounts.
For the person at the counter, the consequences are concrete. Agents can ask for a device and for its passcode. A US citizen who declines to unlock commits no crime, but the device can be held for weeks or months, and refusal tends to extend a secondary inspection rather than end it. Non-citizens have less room: a refusal, or any inadmissibility finding, can end a trip at the border. Journalists, researchers and executives carrying source material or confidential business data carry the most risk, because the remedies afterwards are thin — a court challenge is slow, and by then the data has usually been copied.
The advice security professionals repeat is unglamorous: travel with the minimum data you need, sign out of cloud accounts rather than merely locking the app, keep sensitive material on a server you can reach from anywhere instead of in local storage, and consider a clean device for high-risk trips. On most phones, powering the device off forces a passcode on the next boot and disables biometric unlock — which is easier for an agent to compel in practice than a memorised code.
Why it matters: the border is one of the few places where a democratic state exercises search power without a judge, and the device in a traveler's pocket now holds more personal, professional and political information than the suitcase the doctrine was written for. A rising inspection rate quietly widens that gap.
Caveat: Golem's report describes a trend. Exact current totals and the basic/advanced split should be checked against CBP's published statistics and the article itself.
