A border phone search warrant dispute has reached the US Supreme Court, with immigration lawyer George Anibowei filing a petition for certiorari on 14 August 2026 (docket no. 26-208), asking the justices to decide whether the Fourth Amendment requires federal agents to obtain a warrant before searching a traveller’s mobile phone at the border.
Anibowei, a naturalised US citizen based in Dallas who practises immigration law and travels regularly to Nigeria to visit family, has had his phone seized and searched by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on five separate occasions since October 2016. The first search, conducted at an airport on his return from Toronto, resulted in agents copying the entire contents of his phone. According to the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which leads his legal team, the government still holds that data.
Each subsequent search has taken between two and five hours, causing delays and missed flights. Every search has also potentially exposed confidential communications between Anibowei and his immigration clients to the very enforcement authorities he represents clients against.
The Border Phone Search Warrant Circuit Split
Federal courts have reached opposite conclusions on whether a warrant is required. Two circuits hold that agents must generally obtain one; six circuits, including the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, hold that no warrant is ever needed. The result, as PLF frames it, is that a traveller’s Fourth Amendment rights turn on which port of entry they happen to use.
Anibowei’s own litigation illustrates the problem. The Fifth Circuit’s 2023 ruling in Anibowei v. Morgan, 70 F.4th 898, affirmed the denial of preliminary relief, but did so solely on the ground that he had failed to establish irreparable harm. The court never reached the merits of his Fourth Amendment claim. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on 8 January 2024 (Anibowei v. Mayorkas, 144 S. Ct. 551). A further Fifth Circuit ruling on 19 November 2025 (No. 24-11042) again affirmed the denial of preliminary relief, prompting the present petition.
The Cato Institute and the R Street Institute filed a joint amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit supporting Anibowei. According to the Cato Institute’s case page, both organisations argued that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has ever sanctioned suspicionless searches of private papers at the border, and that existing carve-outs for warrantless border searches extend only to cases involving reasonable suspicion of contraband or duty-circumvention.
PLF is joined by Trial Lawyers for Justice, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and Arnold and Porter as co-counsel. Kassandra Gonzalez of the Texas Civil Rights Project put the constitutional argument plainly: ‘The border is not a Constitution-free zone. Travelers, including attorneys like Mr. Anibowei, have been forced to surrender their digital privacy at the customs line. We are asking the Supreme Court to ensure that the same warrant protections apply to every American, regardless of which port of entry they use.’
A Decade of Searches, a Stack of Legal Questions
The petition challenges both CBP and ICE policies that permit agents to examine the digital contents of a traveller’s phone, including messages, photographs, and emails, without any individualised suspicion for so-called basic or manual searches. CBP’s own January 2018 Directive on Border Searches of Electronic Devices governs such searches, and CBP enforcement statistics show that the agency conducted 55,318 electronic device searches in the most recent fiscal year reported, of which 13,590 involved American citizens. CBP states that less than 0.01% of all travellers have their devices searched.
In a March 2025 update, CBP characterised claims that device-search numbers had increased due to the change of administration as false, maintaining that volumes have risen consistently since 2021.
Should the Supreme Court grant certiorari, any ruling on the merits would set binding precedent across all nine circuits and affect tens of thousands of travellers annually.
Follow-up: Ohio social media age law on hold again. The US District Court had already entered summary judgment in favour of NetChoice and enjoined Ohio’s Parental Notification by Social Media Operators Act (H.B. 33) entirely on 16 April 2025, holding the law to be a content-based restriction on minors’ constitutionally protected speech that fails strict scrutiny, and finding its vague language in breach of operators’ due process rights (NetChoice, LLC v. Yost, 778 F. Supp. 3d 923). The Sixth Circuit had nonetheless provisionally allowed Ohio to enforce the law, but reversed course in an 17 August ruling, granting NetChoice’s motion to halt enforcement while the group prepares its own Supreme Court petition. The Sixth Circuit is simultaneously hearing NetChoice’s parallel challenge to Tennessee’s social media age-verification law (NetChoice v. Skrmetti); the NetChoice litigation centre has confirmed oral arguments in both cases were held at the Potter Stewart US Courthouse in Cincinnati.
In Anibowei, the Supreme Court’s response to the certiorari petition will be the next procedural marker to watch.
