When Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick returned from an international trip in early 2025, he walked into what his lawyers now describe as a premeditated ambush. Customs and Border Protection agents pulled him into secondary interrogation at the airport — but according to internal government emails later obtained by his legal team, CBP had already placed him on a watch list and discussed plans to detain him for “suspected terrorism activities.” His crime, apparently: organizing against the construction of a law enforcement training facility in Atlanta known as Cop City.

What unfolded in that interrogation room has since produced a federal felony charge that legal experts say they have never seen before — and a case that sits at the intersection of digital privacy rights, political activism, and the expanding authority of border agents to search the devices of every American who crosses an international threshold.

The Interrogation and the Duress Code

Tunick’s Google Pixel phone was running GrapheneOS, an Android-based operating system specifically built around privacy and security. Among its features is an optional duress code — a secondary passcode, distinct from the device’s normal unlock code, that when entered immediately and irreversibly deletes all data and eSIMs stored on the phone.

During the interrogation, CBP agents told Tunick they wanted to search his phone for evidence of child sexual abuse material. They informed him that if he refused to unlock the device, it would be confiscated. According to Tunick’s lawyers, he was never read his rights and repeatedly requested legal counsel — requests the agents denied.

Tunick then provided a code to the agent. The agent entered it. According to reporting by Ars Technica, “the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart.” All data on the device was gone. Agents confiscated the wiped phone anyway, and Tunick was allowed to leave.

In late 2025, the US Department of Justice filed criminal charges against him under a statute that makes it illegal to “knowingly destroy or damage property” to prevent it from being seized. If convicted, Tunick faces up to five years in federal prison.

A Novel Legal Strategy with No Precedent

Experts at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, speaking to TechCrunch, stated they had never seen this particular law applied in this manner. The DOJ’s argument requires establishing that Tunick knowingly tricked a federal agent into destroying data that the government had a legal right to seize — even though Tunick himself claims he was being subjected to a constitutionally dubious search conducted under false pretenses.

Tunick’s lawyers have filed a motion to suppress all evidence gathered during the interrogation, including the act of entering the duress code. The motion argues the entire encounter was “a pretext for a fishing expedition” targeting activists who opposed Cop City — the $118 million law enforcement training facility that ultimately opened in spring 2025.

Central to that argument is the government’s own paper trail. According to The Guardian’s reporting on the first hearing, held in late July 2026, CBP agents had communicated over email about plans to detain Tunick upon his return to the US. Tunick was involved with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the activist group that organized resistance to the Cop City project. His lawyers contend he was not stopped as part of any routine border enforcement — he was targeted.

The Border Search Exception: A Shrinking Zone of Rights

The government’s authority to demand access to electronic devices at the border rests on what courts call the “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment. This legal doctrine has historically allowed warrantless searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects at ports of entry on the grounds that the government has a compelling interest in controlling what and who enters the country.

But the application of that doctrine to smartphones — devices that can contain decades of personal communications, financial records, location histories, and private photographs — has generated significant legal controversy and an ongoing circuit split among federal courts.

The Supreme Court addressed cell phone privacy in Riley v. California (2014), ruling that the search-incident-to-arrest exception did not apply to phones, and that warrants were generally required for phone searches in domestic settings. The court specifically noted that cell phones “differ in both a quantitative and a qualitative sense” from other items due to the immense volume of personal data they contain.

Yet that ruling has not been extended to the border context by most circuit courts. As recently as July 22, 2026 — just days before Tunick’s first hearing — the Fourth Circuit ruled in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo that border agents can conduct manual searches of a traveler’s phone without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever. The EFF, which filed an amicus brief in that case alongside the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, argued that at minimum, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to both manual phone searches and forensic searches using extraction software. The Fourth Circuit rejected that argument.

GrapheneOS: Built for Exactly This Scenario

The duress code feature at the center of this case is not a hack or an exploit. It is a documented, publicly available feature of GrapheneOS, described openly on the project’s official features page. The OS, which runs only on Google Pixel phones from the Pixel 6 onward, was designed for users with elevated privacy concerns — journalists, activists, attorneys, and others who handle sensitive information.

The duress code works by allowing users to set a separate code that, when entered on the lock screen, triggers an immediate and irreversible wipe of all data and eSIMs on the device. It exists precisely because the scenario Tunick encountered — being coerced under threat of confiscation to hand over a passcode — is one that privacy-conscious users have long anticipated.

Whether providing that code under duress, when an agent has demanded access and threatened seizure, constitutes a criminal act of destruction is now a question a federal court will have to answer. The DOJ’s theory requires a jury to find that Tunick acted with criminal intent to obstruct a lawful seizure — despite the fact that, as Tunick’s lawyers argue, the search itself may have been unlawful from the outset.

Activism, Watch Lists, and the Terrorism Label

The broader context of this case raises questions that extend well beyond phone security. Defend the Atlanta Forest, the group Tunick was associated with, opposed a project that has itself been the subject of significant controversy. Georgia authorities previously sought to charge some Cop City protesters under state racketeering statutes — charges that were later dropped.

The government’s use of the word “terrorism” in its internal communications about Tunick — before he had been charged with any crime — to justify placing him on a watch list and planning his detention at the border represents an application of that framing that his legal team is directly challenging. Their suppression motion frames CBP’s actions as a politically motivated intelligence-gathering operation dressed up as routine customs enforcement.

The first hearing in the case took place in late July 2026. No trial date has been publicly set.

What This Case Could Mean Going Forward

If the DOJ succeeds in prosecuting Tunick under this statute, the implications are significant. It would establish a precedent that using a built-in privacy feature of a legal software product — one designed by developers to protect users from exactly this kind of forced disclosure — can be treated as a federal felony when exercised at a border crossing.

Conversely, if Tunick’s suppression motion succeeds, the court may be forced to scrutinize how CBP uses terrorism watch lists to target activists for intelligence gathering at the border — a practice that, if confirmed by the documentary evidence his lawyers cite, would represent a serious expansion of surveillance authority beyond its stated counterterrorism purpose.

The case is being watched closely by digital rights organizations. EFF experts have already characterized the DOJ’s charging theory as unprecedented. The outcome may ultimately determine whether Americans returning from abroad can be held criminally liable for exercising control over their own private data — or whether the border, as it stands today, is a constitutional dead zone for the privacy rights the Fourth Amendment was written to protect.

This article draws on reporting from Ars Technica, The Guardian, TechCrunch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.