Trump’s border agents seized a reporter’s phones on a Trump ally’s tip. They wanted his sources, not his luggage.
On July 10, Customs and Border Protection officers at Dulles International Airport flagged Max Blumenthal, founder of the independent outlet the Grayzone, for secondary inspection as he returned from covering the funeral of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Agents asked how he had paid for the trip, who had hosted him, and whether he planned to return. They demanded the passwords to his two cell phones. He declined. They seized the phones — but not his laptop or his digital cameras.
That selectivity is itself the confession. The agents did not take the computer that would have carried his reporting notes and drafts. They did not take the cameras that held the images he had shot in Tehran. They took only the devices that carry contacts, call logs, text messages, and encrypted-communications apps. A customs inspection does not cherry-pick the device that holds a traveler’s encrypted messenger threads while leaving the one that holds his unpublished reporting on the table.
The government’s strongest case rests on the border-search exception — the doctrine, affirmed in United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606 (1977), that federal agents may conduct warrantless searches at ports of entry as an incident of sovereign authority. The Supreme Court in Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014), required warrants for cell phone searches incident to arrest but expressly reserved the border-search question. Under that reservation, the government would argue its agents acted within longstanding authority, that the phones were returned when access proved impossible, and that disclosure of what happened to them in the interim is shielded by law-enforcement privilege.
That case collapses on three points.
First, the selectivity of the targeting. Other American journalists — including reporters for CNN and the New York Times — covered Khamenei’s funeral in Iran. None has publicly reported being subjected to secondary inspection, let alone having devices seized, upon return. Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, made the point directly in the emergency motion she filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia seeking the phones’ return: Blumenthal appears to have been singled out.
Second, the targeting that preceded the seizure. In the days before Blumenthal’s return, Laura Loomer — a Trump ally with a track record of White House–adjacent political activism — posted on social media that Blumenthal should be “taken off the plane by US Marshalls” and “detained.” Blumenthal saw the posts while still in Tehran. CBP then flagged him at Dulles. The sequence — public call, then federal action — is the fact the government will need to explain. The sequence mirrors the pattern now in litigation in the Trump administration’s subpoenas of New York Times reporters’ phone records, which the Times has argued constitutes retaliation for protected reporting. It is also the second case in recent weeks in which federal law-enforcement tools have been deployed against individuals for their political speech or reporting — including against a Cop City activist whose phone was seized at an airport in a parallel proceeding now in federal court. The pattern is the story.
Third, the warrant. At a July 30 hearing, Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema cited the Fourth Circuit’s distinction between a basic cellphone search — in which the owner voluntarily opens the device — and an “advanced” search, in which “equipment, wired or wireless, [is used] to copy and/or analyze the contents of an electronic device.” An advanced search, she said, requires a warrant. No warrant was produced. The Fourth Circuit’s “wireless or wired” language covers exactly the forensic operation the government now claims privilege over — a warrantless advanced search of a reporter’s devices at a border crossing, on the apparent basis of political targeting by a White House ally. That is the operation. The privilege claim is the shield behind which it continues.
The phones were returned a week later — less than twenty-four hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed its emergency motion. The government now claims it could not get into the phones and that the motion is therefore moot. Judge Brinkema was not satisfied. She gave the government fourteen days to produce evidence of who held the phones, for how long, and what was done with them.
The government’s fallback is the privilege claim. At the hearing, the administration’s lawyer told the court that some information about what was done to the phones may be “law enforcement privileged” — the standard government response when it does not want a court to examine what its agents actually did. “You explain how this is done,” the attorney said, “and the individuals who we are trying to get information from are able to ‘beat it.’” Read that back. The government’s own lawyer, in open court, conceded that disclosing what border agents did with a journalist’s phones would let the journalist’s sources “beat it.” The privilege claim is not a legal technicality. It is the operation’s last remaining cover.
Brinkema connected the case to the broader pattern herself. “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, citing the subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters. “I don’t think that can be overlooked.”
The government’s fourteen-day clock is running. It will either produce the evidence of what it did with Blumenthal’s phones or invoke privilege to avoid saying. If it invokes privilege, the court will confront the question the administration has been building toward across multiple fronts: whether the executive branch can use border authority to seize journalists’ communications and then use privilege doctrine to wall off any judicial review of what happened next.