When reporter Max Blumenthal went to a cafe in Tehran one night a few weeks ago to upload videos from his reporting on the funeral of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei,
he began seeing social media posts from Trump ally Laura Loomer targeting him,
including one that suggested he should be “taken off the plane by US Marshalls when he lands back in the US … [and] detained”.

“I began to prepare myself for being harassed on my return,” Blumenthal said.

Effectively, that’s what happened,
sparking a legal fight that freedom-of-the-press advocates say shows the determination of the Trump administration to crack down on members of the media whose reporting it disagrees with.

On 10 July, border patrol agents at Virginia’s Dulles airport flagged Blumenthal, founder of the independent outlet the Grayzone,
for a “secondary inspection”.
Agents asked him how he had paid for his trip to Iran,
whether he knew the people who had hosted him
and whether he had plans to return.

They asked to see his two phones.
He declined to give them the passwords.
They seized the phones, but not his laptop or digital cameras.

The federal agency returned the cellphones a week later
– less than 24 hours after the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committeefiled an emergency motion in district court seeking their return.

The US federal government said they couldn’t get into the phones and returned them,
and that therefore the motion was moot.
But Blumenthal went back to court on Wednesday and got a judge to agree that the government must prove it
– by supplying evidence of who had his phones,
when they had them and what they did to them.

Federal judge Leonie M Brinkema gave the government 14 days to respond.

Blumenthal’s treatment and case pose “serious constitutional problems”,
said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“The Trump administration is finding any excuse it can to target journalists it dislikes,
and border searches are one more play in the playbook.”

It is the second case concerning cellphone seizures at US airports to hit federal courts in recent weeks,
after another involving an activist against the Atlanta police-training center known as “Cop City” had its first evidentiary hearing.

Brinkema cited a recent fourth district ruling that distinguished a basic cellphone search
– when the phone’s owner allows an agent to open the phone
– from an “advanced” search, during which “equipment, wired or wireless, [is used] to copy and/or analyze the contents of an electronic device”.

This is what federal agents sought to do with Blumenthal’s phones.
“I believe now under fourth circuit case law, a search warrant would be required for that degree of intrusion into a cellphone,”
Brinkema said, according to a transcript of the proceedings.
No such warrant was produced for Blumenthal.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/01/border-patrol-reporter-laura-loomer?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other