Tag: border patrol

MS NOW Crew Rescued by Border Patrol After Blunder in the Texas Desert

A far left MS NOW news crew traveled to the southern border seeking a story about immigration and government plans for border barriers.

Instead, the crew produced an accidental comedy after becoming stranded in the remote Texas desert and requiring help from Border Patrol agents.

The network formerly known as MSNBC dispatched correspondent Antonia Hylton and her crew to the Big Bend region of Texas for the debut of “The Assignment.”

Their reporting trip took them to the Alvarado Ranch, where the group apparently discovered that desert terrain does not care about media credentials.

Shortly after leaving the ranch, the crew ran into trouble when its Jeep Wagoneer became stuck as daylight faded.

The same federal agents regularly criticized by left-wing media outlets suddenly became the people the stranded journalists desperately needed.

“As the sun went down, our Jeep Wagoneer bottomed out in the desert,” Hylton said.

That is one way to describe a vehicle becoming firmly acquainted with the unforgiving Texas landscape.

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Chinese National Working as CBP Supervisor at Maine-Canada Border Caught on Camera Swapping Hardware Inside Homeland Security Computers — Then Putting Them Back on the Government Network

A Customs and Border Protection supervisor assigned to the Maine-Canada border has been arrested and charged after FBI agents say he was caught on hidden camera tearing apart government computers, ripping out processors and memory, stuffing in cheaper parts, and plugging the machines back into CBP’s network.

Terry “Jiajia” Liu, 39, of Calais, Maine, described himself as a native of Guangzhou, China. He worked as a CBP supervisor at the Calais Port of Entry, with duties stretching to the Ferry Point and Milltown crossings.

CBP officers are required to be U.S. citizens. According to The Maine Wire, Liu has posted images suggesting he voted in 2020. That does not answer the question every American should be asking: how did a man from Guangzhou end up with after-hours access to Homeland Security computers on the northern border?

According to an FBI affidavit obtained by Steve Robinson at The Maine Wire, CBP IT staff discovered in late 2025 that computers at three Maine border facilities had been modified without authorization. The count grew to 46 machines: 38 in Calais, six at Ferry Point, two at Milltown.

Thirty-nine had their CPUs swapped. Six had RAM changed. Eight had hard drives replaced.

The original hardware included 14th-generation Intel Core i7 processors. What went back in were older, weaker chips, including Pentium-class parts that did not meet CBP specs. Many of those computers were then reconnected to the agency network.

Port Director Theodore Cummings had already told Liu in writing in March 2025: “Please do not move any computers or computer parts.” Stay in your lane. File a ticket. Liu allegedly kept going.

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A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found.

The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI.

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program.

“The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center For Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in an email. Here Border Patrol seems to be “using parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy. If we can’t meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can’t trust them,” he added.

Predictive policing is a highly controversial practice that police departments and federal agencies are increasingly turning to. The practice is designed to find people who may have committed crimes, but at the moment, no evidence of them doing so exists. Broadly, law enforcement may analyze data — such as a person’s movements, where they are at a certain time, or the roads they drive — then create or find another pretense to pull them over.

At around 9:30pm one night in May, Kyle William Olson was driving his black Chevy SUV on Interstate 90, with his dog Ducky in the backseat, according to police reports and an interview Olson gave to 404 Media. In Olson’s vehicle were marijuana edibles, marijuana cuttings, and butane hash oil. He works on a licensed cannabis farm in California, where he had picked up the weed, and was transporting it home to Wisconsin, he told 404 Media.

Olson drove past Sergeant James Beck of the Montana Highway Patrol who was sitting in his police car along with a colleague. When Olson passed, Beck noticed the vehicle’s license plate was obstructed by what he described as a tinted cover and the luggage holder, according to a police report. Beck pulled out, caught up to Olson, and pulled him over.

“Nothing major,” Beck said once he approached the passenger side window and exchanged pleasantries with Olson, according to bodycam footage. Beck said Olson’s license plate was “a little bit obstructed.”

“Just so you know, that’s our reason for stopping you,” Beck said. In the end, the officers demanded Olson step out of the vehicle, they tested his blood and charged him with a DUI. Authorities later charged Olson with possession with intent to distribute because of the marijuana in his vehicle, Olson told 404 Media.

But that wasn’t the real reason for stopping Olson.

During discovery in his case, Olson was provided a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document that explained how Border Patrol instigated his traffic stop. Written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, the document said Phelps was assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID) — Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).” Olson shared the document with 404 Media.

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Chinese Student Charged With Lying To Border Agents Over Alleged Airport Photo Assignments From Beijing

A Chinese national studying at a Canadian university has been charged with lying to American officials to conceal that he took photographs at a Chicago airport cargo facility at the direction of a suspected Chinese official, according to a federal complaint filed in Detroit on Aug. 26.

Zeng Weiheng, born in 2004, is charged with making false statements in a matter under federal jurisdiction. An undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, Zeng was issued a B1/B2 visitor visa in October 2022 and has entered the United States 24 times since then, according to an affidavit filed with the complaint by an FBI agent.

He was arrested on Aug. 26.

Authorities stopped Zeng for an initial screening on Aug. 23 at the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Detroit, after linking his vehicle to a security incident at a FedEx cargo facility at Chicago O’Hare International Airport on April 21.

That day, FedEx employees saw an Asian male spending roughly 20 minutes at the facility. Surveillance footage showed the man climbing onto a construction forklift to take photographs and attempting to open a parked delivery truck and shipping trailer before driving off in a minivan bearing an Ontario license plate.

Zeng underwent three interviews with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials during secondary screening, during which his account of his April trip changed. according to court documents.

In his first interview, Zeng claimed that he had visited tourist sites during his April trip, and the photos of planes in his phone were “pictures of model aircraft being tracked for a flight radar website,” authorities said. When pressed in a second interview, Zeng allegedly admitted going to the FedEx facility to take photos of planes and revealed that he had also trespassed at a FedEx facility at Toronto Pierson Airport in 2025.

By the third interview, Zeng revealed that a contact in China had “assigned him specific planes and their tail numbers to photograph” and he was paid $20 to $30 per photograph, the court documents allege.

In his subsequent interview with the FBI, Zeng admitted that the aircraft photography was a cover story devised by his handler, and the “true task was to obtain interior photographs of the FedEx facility,” according to the affidavit.

His Chinese contact “was primarily interested in information on transportation and logistics in the United States” and “asked for information of flight freight logistics, bus routes, and trains routes and schedules,” the affidavit said.

Zeng also told the FBI that he suspected his Chinese contact was a Chinese regime official working for one of China’s security departments, in part because the contact had provided him with “videos of scenes that only security officials would have access to.”

For his communication with the Chinese contact, Zeng said he was mailed SIM cards from China’s state-run China Telecom, which allowed him to “by-pass Canadian cellular network and connect directly with the Chinese provider network” to send text messages, according to the affidavit.

Zeng was instructed to use the SIM cards only in a Huawei-made phone, swapping in a new card every few months and destroying the old one. He was also told never to bring the phone with him on trips to the United States.

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Limits On Border Patrol Arrests In California Lifted By Federal Appeals Court

A federal appeals court on Aug. 24 rescinded a preliminary injunction that limited U.S. Border Patrol stops and arrests in California’s Central Valley.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that a federal district court failed to properly analyze whether the plaintiffs had standing to seek forward-looking relief based on alleged harms in the past.

Standing refers to the right of someone to sue in court. The parties must show, among other things, a strong enough connection to the dispute to justify their participation in a lawsuit.

The Ninth Circuit sent the lawsuit challenging immigration detentions back to the district court to allow it to revisit its legal analysis after that court issued a preliminary injunction limiting U.S. Border Patrol’s ability to stop and arrest people.

The new ruling, which does not dismiss the lawsuit itself, is a tactical win for the Trump administration because it eliminates – for now – a preliminary injunction that limited Border Patrol’s ability to stop and detain people. The appeals court sent the case back to the federal district court for a limited do-over on the question of standing.

The lawsuit concerns Section 1357(a)(2) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows Border Patrol agents to make warrantless arrests only if they have reason to believe two things: that the person is in the country unlawfully, and that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. The plaintiffs in the case took the position that the agents made arrests without properly assessing whether people were actually flight risks.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued on behalf of the plaintiffs, the United Farm Workers of America and several farm workers, arguing that over a three-day period in Kern County, California, in January 2025, Border Patrol unlawfully detained individuals – including day laborers – without having a reason to believe they were likely to escape before a warrant could be issued. The enforcement project was known as Operation Return to Sender.

Residents of Bakersfield and the vicinity “started disappearing” in “the middle of citrus harvesting season,” and this alarmed local residents who contacted the ACLU, the group said in a summary.

In a federal class action, the ACLU argued the Border Patrol was using “a cruel tactic to strip people of their right to an immigration hearing and coerce them instead into agreeing to “voluntary departure,” which carries with it a ban on returning to the United States for up to 10 years.

In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston granted a preliminary injunction covering the Eastern District, which is California’s Central Valley.

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The Biden-Era C.B.P. Fabricated a Document Used to Imprison a Top-Level Brazilian Official. A U.S. Federal Judge Just Ordered Full Disclosure.

In a case with serious repercussions for U.S. national security and for Brazil, a Clinton-appointed U.S. federal judge concluded that an immigration record entered in the Customs and Border Protection system during the Biden administration was fraudulent. The fraudulent record reflected a non-existent entry into the U.S. by the national security advisor to former President Jair Bolsonaro. The fabricated entry was then somehow obtained and used by a controversial Brazilian Supreme Court judge to imprison that national security official.

Beyond concluding that the C.B.P. document was fake, the federal judge, Gregory A. Presnell of the Middle District of Florida, berated U.S. government lawyers for their refusal to produce all documents in the government’s possession concerning who was responsible for this fraudulent record and how it ended up being used in Brazil to imprison one of Bolsonaro’s closest advisors. I obtained a copy of the transcript from that U.S. judicial hearing and first reported the developments in Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, on Friday.

The judge’s orders were issued as part of a lawsuit brought in U.S. federal court late last year by Filipe Martins, the top Bolsonaro advisor on international relations who was preventively imprisoned for six months in 2024 based on this false C.B.P. immigration entry. At the time, Martins was awaiting trial on charges that he had participated with Bolsonaro in plotting a coup after Lula’s narrow victory over Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election.

The judge overseeing the cases involving the alleged coup is Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has become a political lightning rod not just in his own country but also around the world. He has overseen a censorship scheme so severe that even The New York Times cited internet freedom experts calling it “a potentially dangerous, authoritarian expansion of power.” On other occasions, the Times — obviously hostile to Bolsonaro — raised serious questions about whether Moraes has become a grave threat to Brazilian democracy in the name of saving it.

This is the same judge who ordered both Rumble and Twitter be blocked across Brazil for refusing to comply with all of his censorship orders. When he was unable to collect a massive fine he had imposed on Twitter due to its lack of bank accounts in the country, he simply ordered the funds removed from Starlink’s accounts, a completely different Musk-linked company. Last year, the Trump administration imposed personal financial sanctions on Moraes, alleging that Moraes carried out tyrannical attacks on the free speech rights of U.S. companies and has corrupted Brazilian justice for nakedly partisan ends. The Trump administration appears poised to impose sanctions on him once again.

Moraes has repeatedly demonstrated a particular obsession with punishing Martins, who was appointed by Bolsonaro to be his national security advisor at the age of 31. Brazilian law is similar to American law when it comes to a defendant’s rights regarding pre-trial imprisonment: defendants are typically allowed to remain free prior to trial, absent very narrow circumstances (such as proof of witness tampering or a plan to flee the country). Moraes somehow obtained the false C.B.P. entry showing Martins left Brazil for the U.S. and never returned, and then used that false evidence to order his preemptive imprisonment before trial by claiming it proved Martins sought to flee justice. Moraes had Martins placed in a particularly harsh prison, clearly hoping to induce “confessions” that would implicate Bolsonaro and other political enemies of the judge.

One of the many questions that have never been answered — beyond the key question of who fabricated this document — is how this false C.B.P. entry fell into the hands of Brazilians attempting to imprison Martins. The first time this false C.B.P. record emerged publicly was when a Brazilian reporter known to be very close to Moraes, Guilherme Amado, published a news report full of falsehoods, clearly designed to implicate Martins, starting with the highly accusatory (and false) headline: “Under investigation, former Bolsonaro aide went to Orlando in 2022 and evaporated.”

Just two weeks later, the same reporter announced that Moraes himself had begun using this allegation, speaking off the record to various journalists and politicians to tell them that Martins had gone to the U.S. and “disappeared,” clearly laying the groundwork to order his arrest. Weeks later, Moraes did exactly that, issuing an order that relied upon a police report featuring the fraudulent C.B.P. record to claim that Martins had gone to the U.S. and never returned to Brazil (i.e., “evaporating”).

Not only is it now indisputable that the document on which this story was based was fraudulent, as even the C.B.P. admits, but it was so obviously fraudulent from the start. Indeed, within two days of investigating the case back in 2024, I had obtained so much definitive proof that Martins had never left Brazil that not even my meticulous editors at Folha de S.Paulo attempted in any way to dilute the strong language of my reporting — published shortly after Moraes’ original order of imprisonment — stating that Martins had been imprisoned based on clear fraud.

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The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

The Supreme Court addressed cell phone privacy in Riley v. California (2014), holding that the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement did not apply to cell phones, thereby generally requiring a warrant for phone searches, at least at the interior of the country. The court recognized the unprecedented privacy interests people have in their cell phones and how even brief manual searches can reveal the “sum of an individual’s private life,” including our political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexuality, and more. Accordingly, the Supreme Court held that because electronic device searches bear “little resemblance” to searches of bags or physical containers, they should be evaluated differently.

Following Riley, the Fourth Circuit considered two border device search cases involving forensic searches, in which border officers used external software to extract and analyze a device’s data.

In U.S. v. Kolsuz (2018), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic search of a cell phone at the border “must be considered a nonroutine border search, requiring some measure of individualized suspicion” of a transnational offense, but the court declined to decide whether the standard is only reasonable suspicion or instead a probable cause warrant.

Then in U.S. v. Aigbekaen (2019), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic device search at the border in support of a purely domestic law enforcement investigation requires a warrant. The court also reiterated the general Kolsuz rule for a forensic border-related device search: the “Government must have individualized suspicion of an offense that bears some nexus 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.”

In Belmonte Cardozo, manual searches were finally before the court.

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No Fourth Amendment In American Airports?

Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?

There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.  

Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it.  That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it.  And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.

That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.

According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal.  He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.

He was just a guy.  Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).

You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code?  Sounds suspicious!”

Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.

A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a burner phone to avoid exactly this kind of search in another country.  It was England specifically.  

In England there is no Fourth Amendment and they can search your phone when you land.  They also have no First Amendment and they have terrible censorship laws now.  You can be arrested and jailed for social media posts.  Even some perfectly benign ones, like “Islam is incompatible with Liberty” — that kind of thing.

The Dominican Republic also has no Fourth Amendment and if they simply suspect you have contraband or are engaged in some other illegal activity (so a very wide berth), they have every right to inspect your phone.  Maybe this young man just didn’t want the hassle. Maybe this app was this “left-winger’s” choice instead of a burner, and in the heat of the moment, decided to deploy it once facing our own CPB here in the U.S.

In short, I don’t find it suspicious at all knowing the legal overreach climate we are living in now.  And we certainly can’t be searching American citizens and seizing their devices based on politics alone.  I hope we can all agree on that.

Back to the case:

One attorney, Mike Fox of the Cato Institute characterized Mr. Tunick’s situation this way: “This is new, uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on your Fourth Amendment rights as they specifically relate to your cell phone at American airports/border crossings.  They have ruled on whether or not your phone is searchable in the interior of the United States and the answer is “no” — not without a warrant.

But somehow an American in an American airport on American soil has to surrender his rights to an American customs agent?  What is this sorcery?

Let’s review the Fourth Amendment, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has ruled on Fourth Amendment exceptions at border crossings, but not cell phones in particular.  That’s why you have to go through customs and scanners and open your luggage, etc.  We’ve all been doing it forever without a thought.

But your phone ought to be a separate matter entirely, containing as it does, your digital “papers and effects.”  According to the available reporting, there was no “probable cause” to search Mr. Tunick. CPB wasn’t looking for anything specific, which is what a warrant would demand.  They just wanted to go out on a scenic drive, seeing what they could see on his phone.

Hell. No.

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The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

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House passes GOP’s $70B border security and immigration bill

The House of Representatives officially passed a roughly $70 billion budget reconciliation package on Tuesday, securing a major legislative victory that guarantees three years of dedicated funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Clearing the chamber in a razor-thin 214–212 party-line vote, the enforcement package bypassed traditional filibuster hurdles in the Senate through the reconciliation process, effectively cementing long-term fiscal resources for enhanced border operations, detention center expansions, and thousands of new field agents.

Having now successfully cleared both chambers of Congress following an intense final hour of floor debate, the spending bill officially heads to President Trump’s desk, where it is expected to be signed into law.

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