In United States v. Alisigwe, No. 24-960 (2d Cir. Sept. 17, 2026), a divided Second Circuit held that border agents may conduct searches of international travelers’ cellphones without a judicial warrant, reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, or any individualized justification. This decision should be of interest to anyone planning to enter (or reenter) the United States via New York, Connecticut, or Vermont, whether for business or personal reasons, with a smartphone, tablet, or laptop.

Whereas many international travelers rack up sky miles, the defendant Alisigwe racked up airport searches. In 2018, the United States government began criminally investigating Alisigwe, from whom British border authorities had seized a fraudulent passport. In 2019, upon his arrival at JFK International Airport, federal agents pulled Alisigwe aside, interviewed him, scrolled through his cellphone, and found other people’s names, birthdates, and social security numbers. In 2021, federal agents again stopped Alisigwe upon arrival at JFK Airport, and again scrolled through his cellphone, this time viewing an incriminating communication. On both occasions, he was released into the country.

Later indicted on charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and identity theft, Alisigwe moved to suppress (or prohibit) the cellphone-derived evidence from being introduced at his trial. The district court denied the motion because the presence of reasonable suspicion that Alisigwe was engaged in criminal activity permitted the border agents to examine his phone. On appeal, the Second Circuit agreed that the evidence was admissible, but disagreed that the officers needed any independent justification to search the cellphone of someone entering the country.

Writing for the majority, Judge Steven Menashi highlighted that existing precedent distinguished between searches at the border, including at an airport, that are deemed “routine” (such as those of a traveler’s luggage or personal belongings) and those that are more invasive and “nonroutine” (such as strip searches or involuntary x-rays). While the Fourth Amendment allows the former without a warrant, or any objective level of suspicion, the latter demands at least reasonable suspicion that the prospective entrant has committed a crime.

Essentially likening a smartphone to a digital suitcase, the panel held that “the search of a traveler’s property at the border—including a cellphone—is a routine search that the government may conduct without suspicion.” It expressly limited Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014), which generally required a warrant to search a suspect’s smartphone incident to an arrest, to that specific context. The panel reasoned that border searches of travelers, by contrast, implicate diminished privacy interests and promote the sovereign’s right to determine “who and what may enter the country.”

Concurring in the result only, Judge Eunice Lee would have upheld the admission of the cellphone evidence as deriving from a nonroutine border search supported by reasonable suspicion. Judge Lee wrote that, from a privacy standpoint, an “unrestricted and suspicionless search of a cellphone is intrusive enough to warrant greater protection than the majority gives it today—which is none.” She would not endorse officers’ rummaging “with no suspicion and for any reason” through what is “perhaps the single most comprehensive, sensitive and closely-guarded repository of a person’s private information and data.” As support for these ideas, the concurring opinion relied on Riley and United States v. Carpenter, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)—the latter generally requiring a warrant before officers may access cell site location data to chronicle a phone user’s historical movements.

In this author’s view, any analogy to Carpenter goes only so far: a border search focuses on an individual’s being in a single, known place. But Riley presents a much closer call: the Court there rooted the warrant requirement in the sheer breadth of personal information that the average smartphone contains, as well as their ubiquity. Memorably, the Riley Court wrote that a smartphone could be mistaken for “an important feature of human anatomy.” And today’s phone fits more than any suitcase ever could.

However, important questions remain. After Alisigwe, may border agents, lacking an independent justification, permissibly download the entire contents of a smartphone or laptop that someone brings into the country? And if one person’s whole device were fair game, could agents download the entirety of every device passing through the international arrivals terminal, for mass querying? The Second Circuit’s decision appears to reserve judgment on these questions. Three times, the majority emphasized that the agents had not used sophisticated forensic search methods or extracted the cellphone’s whole contents.

As things stand, travelers entering the United States through New York, Connecticut, or Vermont should assume that information accessible on their devices may be subject to federal inspection. Organizations whose executives or employees travel internationally should thus review their internal protocols to minimize the potential exposure of privileged communications, company secrets, customer data, or other sensitive information. In addition, organizations should ensure that any relevant policies are clearly communicated and, insofar as possible, actually followed.