Muhammed Ihsanullah was overjoyed when he received a $3,000 scholarship to spend the summer working at a camp in Minnesota.
But after several travelers from Western nations were detained or deported as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the 20-year-old British citizen from Leicester, England, is planning on carrying a burner phone when he comes to the U.S. in May. That’s if he ends up going at all.
“I have a very, you know, stereotypical name as well,” Ihsanullah told NBC News.
He might swap out devices, he said, “just so that I have the added security of knowing that no one’s going to go through my phone.”
Potential U.S. visitors such as Ihsanullah are expressing growing uncertainty about their travel plans amid the crackdown and warnings from U.S. embassies in more than a dozen countries, like the one in Sweden that said anyone entering the U.S. on a visa is a “guest” and if you lie about your intended behavior while in the country, “You’re out.”
Earlier this month, a Lebanese doctor working at Brown University’s medical center was sent home despite having a valid U.S. visa after U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents searching her phone found photos and videos they said were “sympathetic” to the former leader of the Hezbollah militant group, whose funeral she told agents she attended last month.
Such searches pre-date the new Trump administration, and Customs and Border Protection says it conducts them to detect “digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility.”
“Claims that CBP is searching more electronic media due to administration change are false,” CBP Assistant Commissioner Hilton Beckham told NBC News in an emailed statement.
“Allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible,” he added.
Such searches are not new to travelers from parts of the world who already face stringent visa requirements — Chinese students arriving in the U.S., for example, have complained in recent years of being increasingly subject to interrogation and detention on national security grounds.
But many of the cases in recent weeks have involved travelers from countries such as France, Germany and Canada — longtime allies with which the U.S. shares intelligence, has frequent cultural exchanges and does hundreds of billions of dollars in trade. Several of those held have spoken out about being scrutinized and sometimes locked up for days at the border.
Last week, France’s interior minister said a French researcher had been turned away by U.S. border agents after they found messages on his phone criticizing the Trump administration. The CBP said searches of the researcher’s electronic media devices — they have not been named by the French authorities — led to the “discovery of proprietary information” from a U.S. laboratory.
CBP does not need a warrant to search the phones of any travelers arriving at the U.S. border, including airports, said Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group based in San Francisco.
“The U.S. government has taken the view that they have the ability to search your devices without a warrant and without suspicion under what’s known as the border search exception to the Fourth Amendment,” she said.
Other travelers have found themselves unexpectedly detained.
Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman who was reapplying for a U.S. work visa, was detained without explanation on March 3 at the Mexican border near San Diego and spent 12 days in detention before returning home. She wrote in The Guardian that she was detained after she was questioned about the status of her visa, which had been granted following an initial rejection.
“There is no communication, you don’t have an officer to talk to,” Mooney told MSNBC last week. “You can’t contact your lawyers or your friends or your family.”
When Rebecca Burke, a backpacker from Britain, tried to enter from Canada in February, she spent nearly three weeks at a detention center. In a statement to the BBC, the Northwest ICE Processing Center said Burke was repatriated after being detained “related to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission.”
Burke’s family said it believes her detention was due to a misunderstanding about her accommodation arrangements, which were free in exchange for helping hosts with household chores and which her father says authorities may have suspected constituted employment in violation of her visa.
And U.S. citizen Lennon Tyler said she was chained to a bench by border agents last month when her German fiancé, Lucas Sielaff, was accused of violating the rules of his 90-day U.S. tourist permit while trying to enter from Mexico. Sielaff was detained for two weeks before returning to Germany, according to The Associated Press.
Such incidents have prompted some governments to issue warnings for their citizens traveling to the U.S. The updated British travel advisory reads “you may be liable to arrest or detention if you break the rules.”
Those warnings have potential visitors to the U.S., like Pat Bastow, a Canadian citizen who plans to rent a car to visit Montana in July for a three-week holiday, seeking advice on how to protect themselves.
“A lot of travel agents are warning people not to go just in case Trump deports,” Bastow, a retired cattle farmer, told NBC News.
Hussain, the lawyer, said she is “encouraging people to think about uploading some of their data to the cloud and downloading it once you’re through screening.”
Turning phones off before arrival is also helpful, she said, as doing so disables facial recognition until a passcode is entered.
Travelers’ rights vary depending on their status — whether they are U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents or foreign visa holders — and their port of entry. Almost a quarter of the nearly 47,000 searches of electronic devices conducted at U.S. borders in the last financial year were of U.S. citizens, according to CBP data.
Hussain advised legal permanent residents, or green card holders, “who may have a bit of a complicated situation” to consult an attorney before traveling.
Visa holders who refuse a search of their devices could see their visas revoked and be barred from entering the U.S., she added.
Rules can vary across the country because the courts have largely avoided ruling on electronic device searches. Last year, a federal judge in New York barred CBP from warrantless searches of people’s phones, but that applies only to John F. Kennedy International Airport.
That lack of consistency, Hussain said, is “really why we believe that the Supreme Court needs to weigh in on this issue.”
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