A US federal appeals court has ruled that border agents may search a traveller’s phone without a warrant, without probable cause, and without even a flicker of suspicion. The decision, handed down by the Second Circuit on 17 September 2026 in United States v. Alisigwe, widens an already broad exception to the Fourth Amendment, which normally protects people from unreasonable searches.

The court’s reasoning rests on treating a phone like a suitcase. Under existing precedent, agents can inspect a traveller’s property at the border without suspicion – and, the court held, a phone is property, so the same rule applies. It brushed aside a landmark Supreme Court decision requiring a warrant to search a phone seized during an arrest, arguing that border searches follow a different logic.

There’s one limit: the ruling covers only an agent manually thumbing through a device. It leaves open whether a deeper forensic search (plugging the phone into specialist software to extract everything on it) would need more justification. And it applies only to the states in the Second Circuit’s territory, though it explicitly overrules judges elsewhere who had insisted on a warrant.

Civil-liberties groups had urged the court to require one. The Knight First Amendment Institute and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press argued that phones hold our private thoughts, our contacts, our photographs and a record of nearly everywhere we’ve been – and, for journalists, the names of confidential sources. Searching them without a warrant, they said, threatens free speech, a free press and freedom of association, not just privacy. The court rejected those arguments.

The practical upshot is simple. If you cross a US border, the device in your pocket (and everything on it) is now open to inspection on nothing more than an agent’s say-so. It’s a concrete example of how a right most people assume is solid can be narrowed a step at a time, each ruling building on the last, until the protection quietly no longer covers the thing you most expected it to.

Source: https://lawandcrime.com/ and https://knightcolumbia.org/