Your Data Is Still Not Your Own at the Border: The Second Circuit’s Alisigwe Ruling and CBP’s 2026 Device Search Directive
On September 17, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held in United States v. Alisigwe that the government needs neither a warrant nor any level of suspicion to manually search a traveler’s cellphone at the border, and it rejected four district court decisions within the circuit that had required a warrant. The ruling follows CBP’s replacement of its 2018 electronic device search policy with Directive 3340-049B, effective January 1, 2026. Business travelers, in-house counsel, and companies whose employees carry client, pricing, or technical data through ports of entry in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont should revisit their travel practices now.
Key Takeaways
- The Second Circuit held that a manual search of a cellphone at the border is a routine search that requires no warrant and no suspicion, and that the First Amendment imposes no separate warrant requirement.
- The court expressly left open whether a forensic search, such as an off-site extraction of a phone’s data, requires reasonable suspicion.
- CBP Directive 3340-049B permits basic searches with or without suspicion and limits advanced (equipment-assisted) searches to cases involving reasonable suspicion or a national security concern, with supervisory approval.
- Under the directive, officers may not intentionally use a device to access information stored solely in the cloud, and a device that […]