Last edited Sat Mar 29, 2025, 08:25 PM - Edit history (1)
You've got to do what works for you. But there's a lot of other stuff on that link that also puts it into perspective like:
In Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, lless than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers encountered by CBP at a port of entry had their electronic devices searched.
That's less than 1 in 10,000
On Edit: In 2024, there were 4200 advanced searches out of 420,000,000 passengers.
and there are two types of searches:
A basic search generally entails an officer reviewing the contents of the device manually without the assistance of any external equipment.
An advanced search is any search in which an officer connects external equipment to an electronic device not merely to gain access to the device, but to review, copy, and/or analyze its contents. Under CBP policy, advanced searches require reasonable suspicion of a violation of law enforced or administered by CBP or a national security concern and require the approval of a senior manager (at a Grade 14 level or higher, or a manager with comparable responsibilities) prior to conducting the search.
The border search will only include an examination of information that is resident upon the device at the time it is presented for inspection. CBP officers may not use the device to access information that is solely stored remotely.
This means no passwords involved except the phone itself, no bank info, no cloud access etc. They require you to disable the network so it can't access anything externally.
So, it's not a routine inspection. It's usually because there's a red flag of some kind like bad ID, or you lie about the contents of your car, you're wanted for something etc. And I already know they've been doing this for years. Nothing new here.
I replied to the OP because I want to support our Canadian friends and I'll continue to do so. Your original comment was too simple and had wrong assumptions. It needed to be clarified. Thanks for doing so because I wouldn't want people scared off when it's really nothing unusual.
= new reply since forum marked as read