TL;DR: On July 13, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, No. 25-4239, that a CBP officer’s two-minute manual search of a traveler’s phone at Washington Dulles was a "routine" border search under the Fourth Amendment, requiring no warrant and no individualized suspicion. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had urged the court to require warrants for all border device searches, called the ruling a misread of its own precedent. Forensic device searches at the border remain governed by the Fourth Circuit’s prior rulings in U.S. v. Kolsuz and U.S. v. Aigbekaen, which require at least some level of individualized suspicion. By tying its holding to the two-minute length of the search in the record, the court left open the question of what happens when an officer scrolls for longer [1].
The Case: Two Minutes at Dulles
Jose Belmonte Cardozo flew into Washington Dulles International Airport from Bolivia. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer met him and, without a warrant, manually searched his cell phone. The search lasted approximately two minutes. Officers found child sexual abuse material on the device. Belmonte Cardozo was already on the U.S. government’s radar before he boarded the flight [1].
Belmonte Cardozo moved to suppress the evidence. The district court denied the motion. The Fourth Circuit affirmed on July 13, 2026, in a published opinion that is now the controlling rule in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. EFF staff attorney Sophia Cope published the foundation’s analysis of the ruling on July 22, 2026, in an article credited to legal intern Suzanne Castillo [1].
The facts make this a hard case for privacy advocates. The search found genuinely horrific material. But constitutional rights get tested on ugly facts. If the Fourth Amendment only protects people we like, it protects no one.
What the Court Held
The Fourth Circuit held that manual device searches at the border are "routine" and therefore reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant or individualized suspicion. Forensic device searches at the border remain subject to the standard set out in U.S. v. Kolsuz (2018) and U.S. v. Aigbekaen (2019), which require at least some measure of individualized suspicion tied to the border search exception’s purposes of protecting national security, collecting duties, blocking the entry of unwanted persons, or disrupting efforts to export or import contraband [1].
The court drew four distinctions between manual and forensic searches. According to the EFF summary of the opinion:
- "in a manual search, a person does the searching, not a machine"
- "a manual search’s breadth depends on the officer’s time and energy, while forensic searches are comprehensive"
- "manual searches reveal only what a user can typically access, while forensic searches can uncover deleted files, cached fragments, metadata, and more"
- "manual searches are subject to an officer’s fading memory or imperfect notes, while forensic searches create a permanent copy" [1]
None of those distinctions turn on the privacy interest of the person whose phone is open. All four turn on the limits of the officer doing the searching.
What EFF Argued, and Why It Lost
EFF, the national ACLU, the ACLU affiliates in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers had urged the court to go the other way. Their amicus brief asked the Fourth Circuit to require a warrant for all electronic device searches at the border, whether manual or forensic [1]. The site covered the amicus stage of the same case in May, when the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments [2].
Their central argument was that Riley v. California (2014) already settled the question. The Supreme Court held unanimously that police need a warrant to search the cell phone of someone they have arrested, because a phone contains "the sum of an individual’s private life" and bears "little resemblance" to the physical containers the border search exception was written to handle. EFF and the ACLU affiliates argued that reasoning does not stop at the border [1].
The Fourth Circuit disagreed on manual searches. EFF’s own framing of the loss: "Scrolling for two minutes through someone’s personal text messages or photos is an invasion of privacy" [1].
The Sliver of Hope the Court Left Behind
By tying its holding to the duration of the search, the court left a narrow path open. EFF’s read: "by relying on the fact that the search lasted two minutes, the Fourth Circuit left open the possibility that lengthier manual searches could trigger heightened suspicion requirements" [1]. No clear line was drawn. A line will have to be litigated in a future case, with facts that push past the two-minute mark.
For now, "routine" means an officer at Dulles, Reagan National, BWI, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, or any other Fourth Circuit port of entry can ask a traveler to unlock a phone, scroll through texts and photos, and walk away without writing a single word down. No judge. No probable cause. No record.
What to Watch
Cert petitions in other circuits. EFF has been running parallel device-search cases across multiple circuits. The Eleventh Circuit’s U.S. v. Touset ruling goes the other direction, holding that no suspicion is ever required for device searches at the border. If the Fourth Circuit now treats manual searches as routine, the manual-versus-forensic split between circuits is sharper, not narrower [2].
Lengthier manual searches. Watch for the next case in which an officer spends more than two minutes scrolling. The Fourth Circuit flagged duration as the operative fact; the next case may force the court to say where the line falls.
Reform legislation. A judicial ruling that a CBP officer can scroll through a phone with no warrant and no record is the kind of fact pattern that pulls legislative attention. Watch for any member of Congress from a Fourth Circuit state to introduce a bill requiring warrants for all border device searches, or for any House Judiciary subcommittee to hold a hearing on the ruling [1].