CBP agents denied Samuel Tunick a lawyer during a warrantless, pretextual border search targeting his Stop Cop City activism

On January 24, 2025, CBP's Tactical Terrorism Response Team pulled Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport as he returned from overseas. Agents demanded the passcode to his phone. According to his defense attorneys, Tunick was repeatedly denied access to a lawyer despite requesting one, was not informed of his constitutional rights, and was told the agents did not need a warrant because he had not yet formally crossed into the United States. When Tunick entered a passcode, the phone screen "went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart" — activating a GrapheneOS duress feature that irreversibly wipes the device when a secondary credential is entered. Agents seized the phone regardless and allowed Tunick to enter the country.

Tunick's attorneys allege that the stated pretext for the border stop — searching for child sexual abuse imagery — was fabricated, and that CBP was in fact investigating his connections to the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement, which opposes the construction of a law enforcement training facility in Atlanta known as "Cop City."

Federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Georgia indicted Tunick on a felony count of destroying property to prevent government seizure, under 18 U.S.C. § 2232(a), for allegedly using the duress password during the search. Legal experts and security researchers described the prosecution as the first known U.S. federal case brought over the use of a duress password at the border. The single-count indictment charges Tunick with knowingly destroying digital contents of the phone to prevent the government from taking the property into its custody and control; it was first publicly reported by 404 Media on December 10, 2025.

Tunick pleaded not guilty. His attorneys filed a motion to suppress all evidence, arguing his rights under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were violated, making the phone seizure and any resulting evidence inadmissible under the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine, and that entering one's own passcode on one's own device — including a duress password — cannot constitute criminal destruction of property when the underlying search was itself unlawful. His federal public defender, Matthew Dodge, told TechCrunch that the statute had been used rarely in indictments and that security experts and attorneys had not previously seen charges brought in this manner. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and privacy researchers expressed concern that a conviction would effectively criminalize privacy software designed to protect journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens from coercive searches.