this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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This is fucking stupid. If I delete something on my phone while I'm on vacation am I going to prison because the border patrol might have wanted to look at it?
We don’t need hyperbole here …. If authorities have a legal reason to search and you interfere with that, destruction of evidence is a crime. Delete all you want …. Right up until authorities claim the legal reason to search. Usually that takes a warrant: investigators must convince a judge there is a good reason
This also includes “when entering the country”. It always has. There’s nothing new here. There are so many things the current administration does to violate rights and due process, but this isn’t one of them.
The slippery slope here is “or within 100 miles”, but that wasn’t a factor here either
as far as I understand, they were not there to serve a warrant. he was crossing a border and the feds are claiming that the 4th amendment doesn't apply because he hadn't yet crossed into America.
border patrol was essentially using a loophole to preemptively collect potential evidence (they'll figure out what to charge him with after they see his phone contents). he's a political activist against a cop city, they were obviously trying to do him dirty.
they were not serving a search warrant. they were abusing what should be an illegal search at the border in order to silence those who speak out against govt overreach.
In addition, the law that he's charged with relates to knowingly destroying property that the police have a warrant to sieze.
There is no precedent of it being applied to border searches where they may not even have reasonable suspicion of a crime and can stop people for questioning on a whim.
The State has absolutely no claim over your personal property at that point and destroying property that the police hope and dream of siezing isn't the same as destroying property where they've demonstrated probable cause to a judge.
This argument from the border patrol that you can be arrested for destroying data that is in your possession without ever been given due process and 4th amendment protections isn't supported by precedence.
These fucking conservatives crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches anytime the government does something heinous and use their piss poor understanding of EVERYTHING to try to justify the heinous actions. It happens every time, and I wish just once to see one of them use real and relevant facts, just so I can pretend that these people live in reality for just one second.
Hasn't happened yet though.
Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.