The Tunick Exception: When the FBI Put Constitutional Rights on Hold at the Border

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

The FBI wanted Samuel Tunick’s phone, waited until his plane landed, and sent in a counterterrorism team that said it needed no warrant, but when the search failed, the prosecution began.

When Atlanta activist Samuel Tunick returned from the Dominican Republic on January 24, 2025, federal officers were waiting at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. His lawyers say FBI Atlanta Joint Terrorism Task Force Officer Burnham and Special Agent Andrea Coble had arranged for US Customs and Border Protection to question him and search his phone before he landed.

The searching officer identified in the indictment belonged to Customs and Border Protection’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team, a specialist counterterrorism unit operating at ports of entry, and whose personnel specialise in counterterrorism response and enforcement operations. Records produced by the government and cited by the defence say the operation concerned Tunick’s association with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the movement opposing Atlanta’s $115 million police and firefighter training centre, widely known as Cop City. Tunick has not been charged with committing a crime through the movement.

According to the record, Customs officers diverted him into secondary inspection, questioned him and demanded the passcodes to a Google Pixel phone and an electronic reader. “When it comes to immigration and customs, right, it’s a whole different ballgame,” one officer said in a recorded exchange quoted by the defence. “We have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.”

Tunick eventually supplied the codes. Prosecutors say the code entered into his phone caused the screen to go blank, flash and restart, deleting its digital contents before officers could examine them. Nearly ten months later, he was indicted for allegedly destroying property to prevent the government from taking it into custody. In July, the government called three customs officials at the hearing on his effort to suppress the airport evidence. No FBI witness appeared on the public witness list.

Interestingly, what started as a counterterrorism referral and became a warrantless customs search now turns on the one thing agents never managed to do: unlock the phone.

The Search

According to Tunick’s motion, the officers introduced themselves by saying they were looking for “people who are pedophiles.” The defence says the government’s reports recorded no prior suspicion that he possessed child-exploitation material. They pointed instead to his ties to Defend the Atlanta Forest, which the government depicted in records cited by Tunick’s lawyers as an “Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group.”

After the phone restarted, officers inspected every item in his bag. A third officer took him into another room for a body search after Tunick said he did not consent. The search was not recorded. When he returned, the camera captured him putting his sweatshirt back on.

A Department of Homeland Security agent then arrived with three more agents and tried to interview him again. Tunick declined and pointed to his attorney’s card, already on the table. The agent said Tunick was not under arrest but would be free to leave only when the other officers were finished. His phone and electronic reader were seized, with a promise that they would be returned after 30 days.

A grand jury returned a sealed indictment on November 13, 2025. It charges Tunick under Title 18, United States Code, Section 2232(a), and identifies the searching officer only as “Supervisory Officer L.C.” The docket records an arrest warrant issued the same day and executed on December 3, when the indictment was unsealed, and Tunick pleaded not guilty.

The Counterterrorism Unit

Officer L.C. belonged to the Tactical Terrorism Response Team (TTRT). The unit did not arrest Tunick at the airport. Its officers intercepted him, questioned him and tried to search his phone, which he refused. It was that very encounter that produced the allegation used to charge him months later.

The unit is not an informal airport detail. Its personnel must maintain security clearances, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigated its training, activities, policies and procedures at major international airports. The Intercept reported that its officers questioned roughly 600,000 travellers between 2017 and 2019, about 180,000 of them US citizens.

Its methods later surfaced in litigation involving journalists, lawyers and advocates associated with migrant caravans at the southern border. One was New York pastor Kaji Dousa. Leaked records showed customs officials had placed her on a secret watchlist of journalists, attorneys and advocates. A Department of Homeland Security inspector general found that she was among at least 51 US citizens tracked in the operation, and that nearly half the government’s lookouts involved people for whom there was no evidence of direct participation in illegal activity. A federal judge ruled in 2023 that the government violated Dousa’s constitutional rights.

Tunick’s lawyers say Burnham and Coble used that border apparatus in Atlanta. Joint Terrorism Task Forces combine federal, state and local officers in national-security investigations. In this case, the border checkpoint allegedly gave FBI personnel access to a search power they would not ordinarily possess inside the country.

The Hunt for Devices

A separate FBI operation targeting Defend the Atlanta Forest shows investigators taking another route to the same airport.

They sought the person behind [email protected], an address presented as the movement’s main contact on Facebook and a blog that publicised protests and actions against the training centre. An affidavit reported by 404 Media showed that an agent assigned to a domestic-terrorism squad obtained subscriber information through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request to Switzerland.

Proton, the encrypted email provider based in Switzerland, supplied payment-related information to Swiss authorities under a Swiss order. The data reached the FBI through the international legal-assistance process and identified a person investigators believed had paid for the account. Investigators then obtained that person’s travel plans and prepared to execute a conventional search warrant at Atlanta’s airport.

That operation involved another person and a separate warrant. The record reviewed for this article does not show that agents applied for and failed to obtain a warrant for Tunick’s phone. In one operation, investigators went to a judge. In Tunick’s case, they allegedly routed the search through customs officers who told him they needed no warrant.

The comparison forms part of a larger pattern of efforts to reach the movement’s communications. On February 8, 2024, a joint task force involving the Atlanta Police Department, FBI, Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives raided three Atlanta homes linked by police to Stop Cop City. Officers seized laptops, phones, memory cards, a modem and movement materials. Police announced no charges under the array of federal statutes cited in the warrants at the time.

Georgia prosecutors had already shown how heavily authorities valued activist phones. In the state racketeering case against 61 Cop City opponents, prosecutors argued that a protester’s use of a “burner” phone could support an inference of criminal intent. The National Lawyers Guild warned that this risked treating ordinary precautions against surveillance as evidence of wrongdoing. The state also amassed more than five terabytes of evidence. A 2024 defence motion accused prosecutors of obtaining and circulating attorney-client emails collected through Google warrants, according to The Guardian.

The techniques reached different parts of a movement without a conventional membership list. Payment records could identify who funded an anonymous account, blog access could reveal who controlled its public communications, and devices seized from homes could yield stored documents and conversations. Ultimately, a phone intercepted at an airport could expose the private contacts connecting them. This suggests that the operations could have offered investigators the raw material to reconstruct a movement through its communications, even if the available record does not establish that they formed part of a single coordinated programme.

The Missing FBI Witnesses

The interagency chain remained partly hidden when the federal court held a suppression hearing on July 20, 2026. The government called Customs and Border Protection Officer Larry Findlay, Chief Officer Jason Thomas Hawkins and Officer Latoya Castro. The public minute sheet lists no FBI witness, although the defence identified Burnham and Coble as the officials who coordinated the operation before Tunick landed.

The officer named in the indictment as Officer L.C. also remains publicly unidentified. Available court records do not connect those initials to any of the three customs witnesses.

The government admitted three discs (unspecified digital-media exhibits), a brochure and an email. The minute sheet does not describe their contents. The email could bear on the alleged coordination, but the public record does not disclose who sent it, who received it or what it said.

The hearing lasted just over two hours and remains open so testimony from a person identified only as Mr. Kane can be supplemented. The minute sheet gives neither Kane’s full name nor his agency or role, and does not list him among the three identified government witnesses.

Tunick’s lawyers are due to file their post-hearing brief on September 18, followed by his reply on October 23. The court will decide whether statements and evidence from the airport operation can be used against him.

That ruling will turn first on the customs encounter, even though the evidence shows that the operation did not begin at customs. According to Tunick’s account, FBI counterterrorism personnel selected a domestic activist for interception and placed his private communications within reach of the government’s exceptional border-search authority. Yet when the operation entered open court, the government’s public witnesses came only from customs. No one from FBI counterterrorism took the stand to explain the operation’s origins.

21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.