Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Simon Micah Flores was charged with transporting and possessing child pornography. Block Inc. and PayPal had reported suspicious transactions involving Flores’s accounts to law-enforcement agencies pursuant to their Bank Secrecy Act obligations. The reports indicated that payments may have involved nude images or trafficking in child pornography.
After learning that Flores would return from Cancun through Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport, the National Targeting Center flagged him for inspection. Customs and Border Protection officers referred him to secondary inspection and manually reviewed his phone. Officers found alleged child pornography in the Telegram application and photo gallery, including the phone’s resident “Recently Deleted” folder, without conducting a forensic extraction or using forensic tools. Flores moved to suppress the evidence.
The Court’s Holding
The court denied the motion to suppress. Applying United States v. Miller, it held that Flores lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in transaction information he voluntarily provided to Block and PayPal through their applications. Their disclosure of that information to law enforcement therefore did not violate the Fourth Amendment, regardless of Flores’s argument that the companies acted as government agents.
The court also held that the officers’ examination of the phone was a routine border search under controlling Fifth Circuit precedent. Because officers manually traversed content resident on the device and did not perform a forensic extraction or use forensic tools, no warrant or reasonable suspicion was required. The court consequently rejected Flores’s derivative arguments that the border search was tainted by unlawfully obtained financial records or unsupported by reasonable suspicion.
Key Takeaways
- A user generally has no reasonable expectation of privacy in transaction information voluntarily disclosed to a financial-services provider.
- A manual review of content resident on a phone may qualify as a routine border search in the Fifth Circuit, even when officers inspect applications and a resident “Recently Deleted” folder.
- Routine manual phone searches at the border do not require a warrant or reasonable suspicion under the precedent applied by the court.
Why It Matters
The decision applies the third-party doctrine to reports from mobile-payment providers and illustrates the breadth of the border-search exception in the Fifth Circuit. It also draws a practically important distinction between manually viewing content accessible on a device and using forensic tools to extract deleted, encrypted, or otherwise inaccessible data.