@wired: United States Custom and Border Protection officials have sweeping powers to search anyone’s phone when they are entering the country—including US citizens. Newly released figures show that over the past three months, CBP officials have been searching more phones and other devices than ever before. From April through June this year, CBP searched 14,899 devices carried by international travelers, according to stats published on the agency's website. While the figures aren’t broken down by device type, the CBP has the ability to search phones, computers, cameras, and other electronics. The April-June spike tops the previous highest quarterly figure of at least 12,766 devices, which were searched by CBP officials from January through March 2022, by 16.7 percent. The increase in phone and device searches at the border comes as the second Trump administration takes aggressive actions on migration, with a vast increase in budget for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and thousands of arrests taking place. Since the start of the year, people traveling to the US have reported long detentions, intrusive phone searches and allegedly being denied entry due to content on their devices. In recent months, some European travelers have canceled trips to the US, while the number of Canadian visitors to the US has dropped for seven consecutive months. The CBP’s data shows that there has been an uptick of phone and electronics searches over the past decade, throughout various administrations. According to the agency’s statistics, which are published using the fiscal year running from October to September, there were 8,503 searches in 2015. By 2018, this figure had risen to 33,296 device searches, and the last full year of data available, the fiscal year 2024, there were 46,362 searches.

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Wednesday 20 August 2025 19:12:39 GMT