The Trump administration used border patrol agents to seize a journalist’s phones — and the seizure followed, step-for-step, from a targeted online campaign by Trump ally Laura Loomer.
On 10 July, at Dulles, Max Blumenthal — founder of the independent outlet the Grayzone — landed from reporting on the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader and was pulled into “secondary inspection.” Agents asked how he had paid, who hosted him, and whether he would return. They demanded the passwords to his two cell phones. He refused. They took the phones anyway, leaving his laptop and digital cameras untouched, and held them for a week. The phones came back less than 24 hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed an emergency motion. The government’s explanation: they could not get into the phones, so the motion was moot. They returned them and called it done.
It is not done. Federal judge Leonie Brinkema ordered the government to prove it — to show who had the phones, when, and what was done to them. The seizure was not a stray act by an officer with a hunch. Loomer, a Trump ally with the president’s ear and a record of targeting people she dislikes online, posted before Blumenthal even boarded his return flight that he should be “taken off the plane by US Marshalls when he lands back in the US … [and] detained.” He began preparing himself for harassment before his plane touched the ground. The post and the seizure fit together. They are not a coincidence the government has any business asking the country to believe.
This is the second press-freedom case in federal court in two weeks. The administration is also pursuing phone records of New York Times reporters and their relatives — a campaign the Times is now arguing in court is retaliation for its reporting — and a separate prosecution of a Cop City protester is testing how far a federal anti-destruction statute can be stretched to criminalize dissent. At the same airport where Blumenthal’s phones were taken, agents in another case sought an “advanced” search of an activist’s device — the kind of forensic copying a Fourth Circuit ruling now requires a warrant to authorize. No warrant was produced for Blumenthal. His phones were seized under the broad “border search” exception, the long-standing doctrine that travelers crossing the national line surrender some privacy so officers can check what is coming in. The exception was built for contraband. It is now being wielded against a journalist’s source list.
That is what the phones are. Border patrol agents did not take Blumenthal’s laptop or his cameras — the equipment that holds the finished reporting. They took the phones, which hold the contacts, the encrypted chats, the source relationships that make the reporting possible. As Jenin Younes, president of the ADC, put it: they were after communications, not finished product. The seizure was an attempt to learn who Blumenthal talks to. It is the oldest press-freedom abuse in the American catalogue: the government fishing for the names of people a reporter will not name.
Brinkema saw it. “Given the fact that this plaintiff is a reporter, this case has particular concern to the court because there’s been so much recently in the ether about attempts by the government to intrude upon a reporter’s right to report,” she said at Wednesday’s hearing. The judge suggested Blumenthal hire an expert to examine the phones for any sign of tampering. He is working on it. It costs a lot. The cost is part of the design. A government that seizes a journalist’s property and dares him to prove what was done with it has built a system that punishes the exercise of the First Amendment by attaching a price tag to defending it.
This is the modern American press freedom story, and it is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism with names and dates: subpoenas to the Times and its reporters’ relatives, the Cop City activist’s phone seized at the same airport, and now a Loomer-targeted reporter’s two phones held for a week under a doctrine built for smuggled cigarettes. Each piece alone is defensible inside the bureaucracy that performed it. Together, they describe a federal apparatus repurposed, one seizure at a time, into the press desk of a political movement. A reporter who covers Iran for an independent outlet a Trump ally dislikes is searched at the border by agents acting on her cue. The law enforcement privilege the government is now claiming — the claim that what it did with the phones is too sensitive to disclose — is the privilege of a department that has become, in practice, an instrument of political targeting. That is what the privilege protects.
I have to name what I know about this machinery before I name what the prophets knew. I am a Catholic. I was raised in the Catholic-Right wing of that tradition, the wing that has spent fifty years calling itself the pro-life movement while helping elect officials who separate children from their parents at the border, who bomb the hospitals doctors in my tradition run overseas, and who now use border agents to seize the phones of journalists who write the words their coalition wants suppressed. I did not always see this clearly. I do now. We who call ourselves pro-life must not become the people who use state power to silence the journalists who could expose what we do not want seen. That warning is not theoretical, and it is not addressed only to my opponents. It is addressed first to me, and to the people who taught me to pray, and to the bishops whose silence made the warning necessary. The Catholic-Right infrastructure — the cable outlets, the donor networks, the pressure campaigns on Rome — is part of the climate this administration is exploiting. I will not name my tradition’s complicity here and exempt myself from it.
The Hebrew prophets saw this disorder nine centuries before there was a Fourth Amendment, and they named it without softening it. Amos, watching a kingdom where the border guards served the courtiers and not the law, said: “Woe to you who turn justice into wormwood and cast righteousness to the ground.” He had another line for the same rulers, sharper and shorter: trampling the head of the needy into the dust of the earth. That is what is happening at Dulles. The Pharisees the Gospels describe did the same thing in another century: they held up the law while using the law to crush the people they feared, and they called it order. Jesus called them whitewashed tombs. He did not say it gently, and he did not say it to people outside his own tradition — he said it to the people who claimed to be inside it. The phone seizure at Dulles is a modern American instance of the same sin: the law held up, the law used to crush, the cruelty called order.
The playbook is not hidden. It works like this: identify a reporter whose work the coalition finds inconvenient, have an ally put the target’s name into public circulation, then let the machinery of the state find a lawful-sounding reason to stop the work. The reason can be anything — a national-security concern, a border inspection, a leak investigation — because the reason is not the point. The intimidation is the point. The message to every other journalist in the country is the point. And the message is: you are next.
What makes the playbook particularly insidious is the selective application. Blumenthal was one of many journalists who traveled to Iran to cover Khamenei’s funeral. The mainstream outlets — CNN, the New York Times — sent their own people. None of them were detained at the border. The difference is not what Blumenthal did in Tehran. The difference is that Loomer had not posted their names. Loomer targets anti-Zionist voices by name; the border machinery then activates. The two stages of the playbook are publicly visible because Loomer does the first stage out loud, and the administration has not asked her to stop.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in 1891 about workers ground between two sets of powerful interests, gave the Catholic tradition a sentence that applies here: To exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. The indigent today are not just the migrant at the checkpoint; they are the journalist whose phone is the new contraband, the source whose name is the new currency, the dissent whose voice is the new contraband the state seizes at the line. The law the administration is invoking at Dulles was built for smuggled cigarettes and for the question of who is crossing. It was not built to learn who a reporter has talked to. When the state uses one law to do the work of another, the lawyers call it a creative application. The prophets called it trampling. The same word fits.
The Trump administration will fight every inch of disclosure, because disclosure would prove what everyone already suspects — that the phones were searched for sources, contacts, and communications, and that the search was directed from above. Blumenthal’s lawyer has already warned that this will be a protracted battle. She is right. The administration will use the border-search doctrine until the courts strip it away, and then it will find another, and another, because the doctrine is not the engine — the will to silence the press is the engine, and a will does not run out of doctrines.
The door of return is open. The agents who seized the phones can testify in open court about what they did with them. The officials who approved the seizure can release the warrantless authorization. The political operative whose posts preceded the seizure can be asked, under oath, what she communicated with whom about Max Blumenthal. A republic that uses its customs service as a press desk does not have to keep doing so. The judge has given the government fourteen days to begin answering for it. That is the next test — not whether the phones get returned, which they have, but whether the country is willing to learn what was done with them while they were gone.
I want to close with the question the judge asked, because it is the question the prophets would have asked, and the question the Catholic tradition at its best has always asked of the powerful. What did you do with his phones, and who told you to do it? The administration’s answer to that question, in the fourteen days the court has given it, will tell the country whether it is still a republic where the border patrol watches the line — or whether the line now watches the press.