Phone searches rise at U.S. border
Advocates say increase in inspections of devices part of Trump’s overall immigration agenda
WASHINGTON— Customs officers stationed at the U.S. border and at airports searched an estimated 30,200 cellphones, computers and other electronic devices of people entering and leaving the United States last year — an almost 60-per-cent increase from 2016, according to new Homeland Security Department data.
Despite the surge, Customs and Border Protection officials said the searches affected fewer than 1 per cent of the more than 300 million travellers who arrived in the United States last year.
Homeland Security officials say border searches are an important investigative tool and are used sparingly by its agents.
“In this digital age, border searches of electronic devices are essential to enforcing the law at the U.S. border and to protecting the American people,” said John Wagner, deputy executive assistant commissioner at Customs and Border Protection.
Wagner said the agency was committed to preserving the rights and civil liberties of travellers whose devices are searched.
Searching people and packages at the border is a long-standing practice, dating to the founding of the United States. But they have taken an added significance in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which has promised to limit both illegal and legal immigration to the United States.
Privacy and immigration advocates see the increase in searches as part of the administration’s overall immigration agenda, which includes a travel ban against several Muslim-majority countries and rescinding an Obama-era program that allowed unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to live and work in the country without fear of being deported.
The Trump administration has also proposed a 1,600-kilometre border wall — along nearly half the Southwest border — that Homeland Security officials estimate would cost about $18 billion (U.S.), according to a congressional aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Privacy activists and those who have been detained at the border say the examination of their phones, computers and hard drives are invasive and violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
But courts have long held that those protections do not apply at the border or airports because of the government’s compelling interest in combating crime and terrorism.
A 2014 Supreme Court ruling did say, however, that law enforcement needed to have a warrant to search electronic devices when a person was being arrested.
But since that case did not involve a search at the border, Homeland Security officials said the ruling did not apply to customs officers.