Border Cops Try To Make an End Run Around Attorney-Client Privilege
Attorney-client confidentiality is one of the oldest pillars of American justice. Americans not only have a right to talk with a lawyer, but also to talk privately with the lawyer. After all, what good would it be to ask for legal advice if the police could use that conversation against you?
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asserts a very different principle: that your privacy rights disappear at the border. CBP policy gives officers the right to seize and search any electronic device that passes through customs. While the agency claims that copies of any attorney-client documents will be “destroyed” after a search, it doesn’t recognize limits on its ability to collect and copy those documents in the first place.
Detroit lawyer Amir Makled got a glimpse of that policy in action while coming back from a family beach vacation in the Dominican Republic on Sunday. As first reported by the Detroit Free Press, agents held Makled for 90 minutes at the airport while they demanded to go through his phone. Eventually, he let them look at his contacts list, though he wouldn’t tell them whether specific people were his friends, relatives, or clients.
CBP seemed to be waiting for Makled when he got back, he tells Reason, because staff at the passport control booth asked for a “TTRT agent,” which may stand for Tactical Terrorism Response Team. Makled was then brought into a back room with a plainclothes officer who refused to give his name and told, “we know that you’re an attorney, and we know that you take some high-profile cases,” according to Makled.
His firm, Hall Makled, specializes in civil rights, personal injury, and criminal defense work. Makled says that the only high-profile client he can think of is Samantha Lewis, a protester charged wi
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