Fourth Circuit rules border agents may manually search phones without suspicion, joining all other circuits

On July 13, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in United States v. Belmonte Cardozo (No. 25-4239) that border agents may manually inspect travelers' cell phones without individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. Writing for a unanimous three-judge panel — Chief Judge Albert Diaz, Judge Steven Agee, and Judge Marvin Quattlebaum (who authored the opinion) — the court held that manual device searches at the border qualify as "routine" under the longstanding border search exception to the Fourth Amendment and therefore require neither a warrant nor any particularized suspicion of criminal activity.

The case arose from a manual inspection of Jose Alejandro Belmonte Cardozo's phone at a U.S. port of entry. The panel drew a distinction between manual searches — in which a border officer scrolls through visible device contents for a limited time using only human effort — and forensic searches, which use specialized software to extract deleted files, metadata, and other non-visible data over extended periods. Forensic searches, the court reaffirmed, still require at least reasonable suspicion under prior circuit precedent. The majority emphasized the brief two-minute duration of the manual search at issue, leaving open whether prolonged manual inspections might one day require a higher showing, though it set no such standard.

With this ruling, the Fourth Circuit joined every other federal appeals court that has addressed the question in holding that manual border phone searches are permissible without any suspicion of wrongdoing. The Fourth Circuit's jurisdiction covers Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia — including major international airports at Washington Dulles, Baltimore/Washington, Charlotte Douglas, and Raleigh-Durham — through which millions of travelers enter the United States annually.

Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had filed an amicus brief urging the opposite result, argue that modern smartphones contain the full scope of a person's private life: private communications, financial records, professional files, attorney-client privileged materials, and location histories. By classifying a manual sweep of that data as constitutionally equivalent to checking a traveler's luggage, the Fourth Circuit's ruling exposes this information to suspicion-free government inspection at the border, with particular implications for journalists, attorneys, activists, and political organizers passing through Fourth Circuit ports of entry.