Seventh Circuit Sets Down Precedent, Says ‘Riley’ Warrant Requirement Doesn’t Apply At US Borders

We didn’t really need more precedent assuring us our rights don’t mean anything at the borders, but we got it anyway.

Within 100 miles of any US border (and that includes international airports), courts have generally ruled that rights are optional. If they seem to be getting in the way of “securing” the border, they have to go. And that’s why intrusive device searches have increased steadily in recent years, despite the Supreme Court’s 2014 Riley decision. That ruling said warrants were required to search cell phones because cell phones, unlike someone’s trunk or pants pockets, contained a wealth of personal and private information previously unseen in the history of the nation.

Given the rationale for the warrant requirement, you’d think courts would extend it to cover the nation’s borders. But no court has. When it comes to border searches, Riley simply doesn’t apply.

Not every court has reached this conclusion. A federal judge in the 2nd Circuit said Riley applied at the border. But that ruling was never ratified at the appellate level, so it hardly changes things in the Second Circuit.

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court — which covers the largest amount of southern border (which is where pretty much all the intrusion takes place) — did place some restraints on warrantless border device searches, limiting them to searches for “contraband.” How much that changed anything is unknown, but it was a small step further than any other circuit has been willing to go.

The circuit with the second largest amount of border territory (the Fifth Circuit) hasn’t had any qualms about eradicating the Fourth Amendment at border crossings. An unequivocal “no warrants needed” was handed down by that circuit late last summer.

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court recently revisited this issue. Its earlier ruling on the issue was pretty much a punt. The court decided it didn’t need to deliver any ruling on the issue at that point because it could use the “good faith” release valve to sidestep anything approaching precedent.

The primary positions staked out by the parties could not be more starkly contrasted. The defendant argues that nothing less than a warrant authorizes a search of electronic devices at the border. The government asserts that it may conduct these searches without any particularized suspicion at all. In the end, though, we need not adopt either of these positions, and indeed may avoid entirely the thorny issue of the appropriate level of suspicion required. Instead, we affirm the district court’s denial of the motion to suppress because these agents acted in good faith when they searched the devices with reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime was being committed, at a time when no court had ever required more than reasonable suspicion for any search at the border.

That’s how it went in April 2019. Here’s how it’s going now:

The “longstanding recognition that searches at our borders without probable cause and without a warrant are nonetheless ‘reasonable’ has a history as old as the Fourth Amendment itself.” United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 619 (1977). That history leads us to join the uniform view of our sister circuits to hold that searches of electronics at the border—like any other border search—do not require a warrant or probable cause, and that the kind of routine, manual search of the phone initially performed here requires no individualized suspicion. We affirm.

That’s from the opening of the appeals court decision [PDF], one that portrays a CBP agent’s trawl through a traveler’s phone as a “routine, manual search,” which included demanding (and obtaining) a passcode, digging through images stored on the phone, and unlocking (with the provided passcode) another application where more images of child sexual abuse were discovered.

The traveler (and the person seeking to suppress the evidence discovered on his phone) is Marcos Mendez, a US citizen who had previous arrests for solicitation of a child and CSAM possession. So, he was already on the CBP radar. That being said, it’s a bit chilling to realize this is what the CBP thinks is an indicator of child sexual abuse — something the Seventh Circuit tacitly endorses by placing it in the decision without further comment:

Mendez also fit the profile for child-pornography offenders: a single adult male traveling alone.

Well… OK, then. The supposed connective tissue was the fact that Mendez traveled alone to Ecuador, which is apparently just as suspicious because… well… rank speculation, I guess?

[M]endez was returning from Ecuador, which CBP officers classified as a potential child trafficking source country.

Couldn’t literally any country be considered a “potential child trafficking source country?” I mean, we’re just talking potential here. It’s not other countries, which are known destinations for people seeking to engage in sex with minors. All this says is that Ecuador, like every other country in the world, has minors in its population and those minors have the potential to be trafficked for sex.

Anyway, the Seventh Circuit isn’t going to let itself get bogged down by questionable assertions about suspicion asserted by our valiant border officers. Instead, it’s just going to get down to business aligning itself with every other circuit by going on (permanent) record with a free pass on constitutional violations anywhere people might enter or exit the United States.

And, in doing so, the court says things the Supreme Court didn’t say about the Riley decision, even as it uses a very selective direct quote. According to the Seventh Circuit, Riley doesn’t apply at the borders because the incident underlying that historic decision did not occur at the border.

Riley involved the search incident to arrest exception and “carefully tailored its analysis to that context.” Wood, 16 F.4th at 533. What is unreasonable after arrest may be perfectly reasonable at customs, as Riley itself anticipated. See Riley, 573 U.S. at 401–02 (“[O]ther case-specific exceptions may still justify a warrantless search of a particular phone.”)

But the Seventh Circuit’s blanket exception for border searches ignores a crucial part of the very decision it quotes:

“[O]ther case-specific exceptions…”

This ruling has nothing to say about specifics. While it’s certainly true a known sex offender will receive greater scrutiny when entering or exiting the country, the ruling here applies this line of thought to everyone crossing borders, whether or not any reasonable suspicion exists to justify the seizure and search of someone’s phone.

There’s evidence here this search was likely justified under the lower level of constitutional protections at our nation’s borders, but the Seventh Circuit looks at a case-specific exception and makes it a blanket exception by refusing to undo precedent that says federal officers can pretty much do whatever they want, so long as it happens within 100 miles of any border crossing.

So, it’s not a great ruling or even a good one. It just is. And because no appellate circuit has been willing to upset this free-for-all at the border by instituting a warrant requirement, every other appellate circuit thinks it’s OK to ignore the greater message of the Riley decision (that being that almost any search of a person’s phone is intrusive) in favor of just keeping their heads down and allowing the status to remain quo.