Last July, Wilmer Chavarria, a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Vermont, was returning from Nicaragua, where he had visited his mother and other relatives, when he was detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston for no apparent reason. Chavarria was held for more than four hours and released only after he finally agreed to let the agents search his smartphone, tablet, and laptop computer. The agents, who persistently pressured Chavarria to surrender his devices and the passwords for them, informed him that he had no Fourth Amendment right to resist.
They were wrong about that, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) says in a lawsuit it filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes CBP. "Americans don't surrender their constitutional rights as the price of international travel," the PLF says. "CBP policies that claim to give its employees the power to search and seize electronic devices without a warrant violate the Fourth Amendment and therefore should be set aside."
