Overview
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a published opinion on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026, holding that Customs and Border Protection officers may manually search travelers’ cellphones at the border or at airports in the Second Circuit without a warrant or individualized suspicion.
- The court treated airports, including John F. Kennedy International Airport, as the functional equivalent of international borders so routine property-search rules apply to on-site manual phone inspections.
- The opinion rejected importing the Supreme Court’s Riley v. California arrest-context protections into the border context and said longstanding border-search precedents allow suspicionless searches of property at entry points.
- The ruling is explicitly limited to manual, on-site examinations and does not decide whether more intrusive forensic or off-site data extractions require reasonable suspicion or a warrant.
- Judge Eunice Lee warned that suspicionless cellphone searches deeply intrude on privacy, and pending litigation such as Anibowei v. Blanche is seeking Supreme Court review to narrow or overturn the scope of digital searches at the border.