Smuggling Ideas

Or: It's all fun and games until someone loses an iPhone.

I spend most mornings on my back patio with a cup of coffee and a dog in my lap, catching up on world events in a private Facebook group, where me and a couple hundred of my closest virtual friends debate current events and explore alternative solutions like reasonable adults. This piece on Common Dreams was the first thing I saw today. It describes how US citizens returning from international travel—specifically journalists and content creators critical of US. foreign policy—are being detained, questioned about their political views, and asked to hand over access to their social media accounts.

Searching personal electronic devices at the US border isn’t new. It started gaining traction around 2008, when courts ruled that laptops and phones could be inspected without suspicion—just like a suitcase or backpack. But what this article raised for me wasn’t the legality of unlocking your phone at passport control—it was the targeting of dissent. I found myself wondering just how far back this practice goes in US history. So I did a little research to check my intuition that this belongs in the “everything old is new again” category.

Spoiler alert: it does.

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The US government has claimed sweeping authority to search and question people at its borders since the earliest days of the republic. In fact, Congress granted customs officers the power to search ships, cargo, and people entering the country before the Fourth Amendment was even ratified. That amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” has always stopped short of the waterline. Courts later formalized this difference through what’s now called the border search exception, which gives agents at the border—now chiefly under Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—the ability to search travelers without a warrant or probable cause, often with few limits.

These powers haven’t been applied neutrally. Across administrations of both parties, border enforcement has been used as a tool not just for customs and immigration, but for policing political ideology. During the Cold War, suspected communists and leftist intellectuals were flagged or barred from returning to the US, often under Republican administrations but with support from Democratic legislators. In the 1960s and ’70s, under Democratic presidents with Democratic majorities in Congress, civil rights leaders and anti-war activists were surveilled, and some were detained or questioned at the border following travel abroad. After 9/11, the Bush administration used CBP powers to interrogate Muslim Americans, peace activists, and journalists returning from the Middle East—practices that continued under Obama, albeit with quieter rhetoric.

What connects these cases isn’t a single ideology or party—it’s the bipartisan tendency to treat foreign travel and dissent as a dangerous combination. The border has long served as a gray zone where constitutional protections shrink and suspicion expands. In that space, it has too often been dissent—not danger—that draws official attention.

While these established border powers may enjoy exemption from the Fourth Amendment’s usual requirements, they tread dangerous ground when used to interrogate or chill political speech. The First Amendment doesn’t vanish at the border. The government cannot lawfully punish, intimidate, or surveil people based on their political beliefs—whether expressed in a TikTok post, a protest abroad, or a personal conversation during screening.

And yet, that’s precisely the risk when CBP agents start questioning travelers about their opinions on Gaza, asking them to unlock social media accounts, or demanding to know what they earn from online content critical of the government. These actions may not violate the letter of Fourth Amendment precedent, but they almost certainly violate the spirit—and sometimes the letter—of the First.

Courts have been slow to reckon with this tension. National security claims tend to win by default, and the border is treated as an exceptional place. But rights don’t dissolve in the presence of a uniform. If government agents are using the pretext of border enforcement to punish dissent, they are not protecting democracy—they are weakening it.

To justify these interrogations, officials lean on the language of national security. And to be fair, there are forms of political speech that genuinely warrant concern. If someone is crossing the border after calling for an armed insurrection or plotting violent acts against the government, it’s reasonable—even necessary—for agents to intervene. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from consequence when that speech incites or organizes violence. But that’s the extreme end of the spectrum. At the other lies something far more necessary to a functioning democracy: candid criticism of government policy. If the state treats this kind of dissent as dangerous, the problem isn’t the traveler—it’s the fragility of the national security framework itself. A democracy that fears ideas is already halfway to losing the argument.

When border agents use the Fourth Amendment exception to target political dissent, they’re not just searching luggage—they’re treating ideas as contraband. Today’s focus may be on criticism of US foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel and Palestine, but history tells us the same tools have been used to scrutinize dissent against domestic policy too—just ask the civil rights activists of the 1960s.

Maybe these recent detentions aren’t about extracting useful intel or catching anyone in a lie. Maybe they’re just a warning shot—meant to chill debate and remind the rest of us to think twice before posting that thread, meme, or fundraiser link. Or maybe the real purpose is distraction. Because more and more people—from all over the political spectrum—are starting to question the same stuff: the steady consolidation of corporate power, the blatant wealth transfers enabled by definitely-not-insider-trading on tariff-induced market swings, and the open corruption of an administration that accepts more forms of payment than your local Walmart.

Whichever way the wind is blowing, now’s the time to ask yourself: how many “Let’s go Brandon” or “Cheeto Benito” memes have you reposted for the lulz? You might just have to answer for them when you get back from your next Disney cruise.