A Miami immigrants rights advocate has sued the federal government after Customs and Border Protection agents seized his phone at Miami International Airport this month as he returned from abroad, saying the search was retaliation for his political work.
Thomas Kennedy, a policy consultant for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, was stopped at a biometric passport control checkpoint shortly after landing on Sept. 6 following trips to Egypt and Turkey, according to his seven-page complaint. Agents took him to a secondary inspection, questioned him about the books he was carrying and confiscated his phone, according to the complaint and media accounts. The Miami New Times first reported the suit.
Mr. Kennedy believes the stop was no accident. “I believe CBP flagged me because of my organizing and political work around immigrants’ rights in Florida,” he wrote in the filing. “This isn’t the first time that law enforcement targeted and harassed me because of my political viewpoint: in 2021, after speaking out against Governor DeSantis, the Miami Police were surveilling me and barring me from press conferences.”
The suit, filed in federal court, asks for the return or destruction of any data agents may have copied from the device. Whether they copied anything at all is unknown, according to Ars Technica.
“CBP shouldn’t have been able to confiscate my phone, let alone copy its contents,” Mr. Kennedy wrote. “I believe they did so to suppress my political speech.”
The legal ground he is challenging is old. Federal courts have long recognized a “border exception” to the Fourth Amendment, allowing agents to search people, bags and electronic devices at ports of entry without a warrant. On its website, CBP says it can copy data from a device “if there is probable cause to believe that the information contains evidence of a violation of law that CBP is authorized to enforce or administer” or “if the information relates to immigration, customs, or other enforcement matters.”
The agency says such device searches are rare. “In 2025, out of the over 419 million travelers CBP processed at ports of entry, CBP only searched the electronic devices of 55,318 international travelers,” the agency wrote. That is 0.0013 percent.
Mr. Kennedy’s account echoes a 2017 episode at San Francisco International Airport, when a local artist told Ars Technica that border agents there had threatened to “be dicks” if he did not surrender his phone. Mr. Kennedy described his own detention to followers on Instagram before filing suit, according to The Travel.