Trump Is Now Detaining and Harassing Returning Americans Till They Submit to Warrantless Searches of Their Phones and Computers

It has always been the case that attempts to target the rights of immigrants end up providing a precedent and an excuse to violate the constitutional rights of citizens. The latest example is a naturalized U.S. citizen detained by Customs and Border Patrol agents until they could browbeat him into allowing an unlawful search of his phone and computer.

Reason describes the case:

Last July, Wilmer Chavarria, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Vermont, was returning from Nicaragua, where he had visited his mother and other relatives, when he was detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston for no apparent reason. Chavarria was held for more than four hours and released only after he finally agreed to let the agents search his smartphone, tablet, and laptop computer. The agents, who persistently pressured Chavarria to surrender his devices and the passwords for them, informed him that he had no Fourth Amendment right to resist. …

Chavarria, who is superintendent of Vermont’s Winooski School District, was understandably dismayed by the CBP’s assertion of that authority. “When he objected, he was told he had no Fourth Amendment rights at the border,” the complaint says. “Moreover, he was told he was behaving suspiciously simply by asserting those rights and refusing to consent to the device searches. His requests to contact his family and lawyer were denied during the detention.” …

Chavarria reflected on his experience in a recent interview with WPTZ, the NBC affiliate in Burlington, Vermont. “You feel like you’ve been abducted by a gang of aggressive, violent people who are trying to manipulate you and who are lying to you,” he said. “And while you are being abducted, you know that these people are capable of doing anything to you because they don’t care.”

As usual, this case takes advantage of an existing legal loophole: an overly broad “border exception” for the Fourth Amendment, which was supposed to allow the screening of physical goods for contraband but is now expanded to include vast amounts of digital information. These loopholes, when harnessed by a hysteria against a vilified target group, erode the rights of everyone.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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