Discussion
How to Keep ICE Agents Out of Your Devices at Airports
seethishat: Don't carry them with you. I'm old and I can tell you from experience... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.
righthand: Burner phones for all! Defund, disband, destroy DHS, ICE, CBP, TSA.
mothballed: I treat all items on an international trip as disposable. Been robbed by thieves, police (Mexico lol), and brutalized by US CBP enough to know it's not worth it to try and take anything across borders besides the shirt on your back. Anything carried is a liability for them to claim you filled some customs form wrong or to fake a drug dog hit on it.
zouhair: Don't go to America is the best alternative.
Ekaros: Only go to good parts. Like Mexico and South America in general.
ishouldstayaway: In English, "America" means the USA specifically.But you knew that already and decided to just post bait.
crimsoneer: Slightly bonkers that we've reached the stage where both extremes of the political spectrum are like "let's go live in caves with no society again, those were good times"
hypeatei: Disbanding draconion intelligence apparatus that didn't exist before 2001 would not mean we're back to living in caves.
moribvndvs: We lived in caves with no society before ICE?
rybosworld: This is where boomer stereotypes come from.> the government is overreaching> "well back in my day we used to walk uphill both ways!"
jeffrallen: [delayed]
comrade1234: "Immigration and Customs Enforcement have already started targeting travelers, with agents in plain clothes forcefully detaining a mother in front of her young daughter at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday after a tip from the Transportation Security Administration."I don't think the tsa is at sfo. They use a private contractor for tsa functions. Is the quote made-up?
Aurornis: The part you quoted isn’t about TSA. TSA and ICE are not the same.
next_xibalba: Do you understand that this would lead to a total collapse of the social safety net?
mathisfun123: Do you know what the words "social safety net" mean? Hint: it's not whatever you think the police are handling.
nequals30: For Linux users, you could try disabling the desktop environment when going through the airport (or using termux-launcher on your phone).It'd be fun to see how they'd handle a CLI. Might result in getting detained, though.
kspacewalk2: No, the quote is not made up, which you can confirm yourself by doing a google search.https://www.ktvu.com/news/ice-agents-arrest-crying-woman-sfo
ceejayoz: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/tsa-data-ice-deportati...> Ms. Lopez-Jimenez, 41, a native of Guatemala, and her daughter, Wendy Godinez-Lopez, were flagged by T.S.A. officials on Friday when they showed up on a passenger list for a Sunday flight from San Francisco to Miami. The agency then tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the documents.https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/politics/immigration-t...> Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers are sharing names and birth dates of travelers believed to have been ordered out of the country by an immigration judge. ICE can then send agents to the airport to detain and quickly deport those people.They don't have to be at the airport to do this; airlines have to send them the manifest.https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-19/chapter-I/part-122/sub...> Except as provided in paragraph (c) of this section, an appropriate official of each commercial aircraft (carrier) departing from the United States en route to any port or place outside the United States must transmit to the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS; referred to in this section as the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) system), the electronic data interchange system approved by CBP for such transmissions, an electronic passenger departure manifest covering all passengers checked in for the flight.
jordanb: The problem is that it actually gets harder. I was a holdout against cell phones when I was young. Eventually payphones started disappearing. Pre-cellphone they were everywhere. By the time I finally caved and got a cellphone I knew where there still were some in important spots around Chicago. Plus you ran into changing norms. Before cell phones people would schedule a meetup (let's meet at noon in this square then go do what we were going to do) but after cell phones it became, "just call me when you get close."I then tried to resist smart phones and stick with my nokia. But then you start to get into things like, the kiosk where they would print your boarding pass doesn't do that anymore. You need a QR code on your phone. You can't call places anymore, you need to do it on their website, etc.Now the government is starting to treat a lack of social media or technology as a reason for suspicion. In the not-too-distant future I imagine it will not be possible to go to an airport without a smart phone and a digital history known to Palentir.
g947o: Airlines like Alaska Airlines make it very difficult to board a plane without a phone. It's still possible, but you need to prepare early and get your boarding pass printed at home, provided that you have a printer, apparently.
smarf: or, perhaps, they are wryly pushing back against the USA capturing a generic geographic term for themselves
nine_k: The usual fare: log out, disable biometrics, use long pins and passwords, power off. Prefer a burner device, or clean your device and restore when you arrive.I remember how Google's internal guidelines for travel circa 2011 required to remove any material under NDA from your laptop when traveling to China or Russia; you had to restore it over the VPN after a safe arrival. Funny that now the same precautions apply to the US :((
joe_mamba: >you had to restore it over the VPN after a safe arrivalHow do you restore it via VPN? Don't you first need a workable OS to connect to VPN first?
chasil: Apple devices allow biometrics to be disabled for unlocking the phone.They are still active for accessing anything in the wallet, however.
techsupporter: > ... I'm old ... you can live life without holding a cellphone all the time. It's not as hard as you think.I'm in my 50s and I don't know where this stance comes from. Sure, you physically can in the same sense that anywhere can be walked to if you're willing to walk long enough. But so many businesses and services have gone "mobile-first" or "mobile-only" to the point that if you're traveling for leisure you're doing extra work on your vacation, and if you're traveling for business you're wasting time that could be used doing your job. Just as a first order, the denizens of every airline subreddit will tell you that the most useful tool during a trip is the airline's mobile app and that's either tied with or just above or below the Flighty app if anything goes wrong.Combine that with QR codes for everything from menus to parking, public transit tickets and fare cards that can be easily loaded into a phone instead of using a ticket machine made when we were kids, or paper maps increasingly hard to find if they're available at all, and you're looking at a real challenge. How are you going to talk to and plan with your travel partner or colleagues with payphones removed?It's also not incumbent upon us to make the government's life easier by making our lives harder. "Just leave your phone at home" is ludicrous behavior to expect when it's the government being the intrusive jerks.
testing22321: I don’t have a phoneSure it’s inconvenient sometimes, but on the whole I’d say my life is better than those I see glued to their phones.This belief is reinforced whenever people ask for my number (dentist, doctor, whatever) The gusto which they invariably reply “OMG I WISH I could get rid of my phone!”
adampunk: What kind of phone does your grownup have?
haspok: Because only those two extremes exist: you either don't have a phone, or your are glued to it?
Aurornis: > It's not as hard as you think.International travel is infinitely more difficult without a cell phone.When I was younger and international roaming was expensive I travelled internationally without a phone. It’s possible, but it’s so much easier to do it with a phone. Later when I finally stopped being a cheap student and bought a data plan my trips were so much more efficient because I wasn’t losing so much time trying to figure everything out without a phone.For international business trips, devices are mandatory. This isn’t even an option.
blovescoffee: Do you really recommend people travel internationally in 2026 without a cellphone? I’m kind of bewildered by this suggestion. As someone who has to go between LATAM and US frequently, I have no choice but to bring my cellphone.
skateflat: I went to Thailand for three weeks in November. I didn’t bring a phone or a laptop. I printed my maps, reservations, and emergency numbers. It was awesome. Don’t lock yourself into imaginary prisons.
mothballed: I don't bring phones either. I go straight to the nearest mall/bazaar/market and buy one. Anyplace developed enough that you need a phone has them for sale. Anyplace where you can't find a phone has enough other people without them you can still get around. The phone gets trashed before I go through the next international border.
GTP: You're an hacker, detained.
Sophira: Additionally: If you have adb access turned on, turn it off before travelling!
hedora: SFO has had repeated hilarious and/or high profile incidents involving the TSA / luggage handlers stealing people's stuff. They stole a pocket knife from my checked bag once.https://abc7ny.com/archive/9192371/This one's my favorite: If you want the police to keep ignoring complaints then don't steal service revolvers!https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/3rd-sfo-baggage-handler...
triceratops: They're probably being nice and think you're a weirdo.I don't btw. I admire you sticking to your principles.
novaRom: Have 2 phones when travel - one in your bag or by your partner, one in your hand. When you fatally drop your phone or it's stolen you can quickly switch to another. The trick is to have both synchronized, but there are good open source apps on F-Droid.
esseph: [delayed]
nine_k: You have a working OS! But you're logged out, all sensitive data is removed (safely overwritten with random data first), and you don't have the means to connect to the VPN or anything corporate (it was before zero-trust architecture), even at gunpoint. You can check your flight status, or look up a cafe nearby to eat, etc. But you have to go to a Google office in the destination city, identity yourself, and get the trusted bits restored on your corp machine. This, together with an OTP device, finally allowed you to reconnect to the internal network (and go check fresh memegen).
JohnFen: Or, if you want to have one with you, leave your regular cell phone at home (or ship it ahead to your destination via parcel carrier) and carry a burner/travel-only phone instead. Don't put any personal data on that phone. Not even contact numbers. Carry those in printed form separately.
mindslight: We really need some straightforward way to carry a mostly-wiped phone, and then download an app, input credentials [0] (stored in your head), and have everything [1] downloaded from a cloud server and ready to go.[0] since I'm spelling this out, one of those credentials should be a passphrase such that the server doesn't have access to your data[1] modulo data/apps you actually want on a phone in a foreign country, of course
raw_anon_1111: You just reinvented iCloud - welcome to 2011.
vkou: What social safety net? Is there some office that I can just show up without any papers and get free money?
mothballed: You basically can for WIC, but that's about it. Although the other big one is public schooling is also almost always entitled to everyone at quite high cost (despite poor performance per dollar).
hedora: Note that the performance / dollar is much worse for immigrants than for citizens.You still have to pay for things like social security, etc, but you don't get to collect those benefits.Before someone says "but illegal immigrants don't those taxes!", note that they actually do:If not, then their employer is engaged in tax fraud, which is much easier to prove and prosecute than trying to track down and check the immigration statues of each of their employees.The US government runs a huge profit on legal immigrants (above average job creation / economic growth), and on illegal immigrants (they pay for services they cannot utilize).
marssaxman: The level of arrogance some western-hemisphere Spanish speakers have, trying to tell foreigners that the name they use for their own country in their own native language is wrong, demanding that they translate the Spanish name and use that instead, is so absurdly entitled that it's just... hilarious.
hedora: I remember when Alaska Airlines wasn't terrible.Any idea what happened? New CEO? Acquisition?
throwawaya58585: A lot of otherwise good companies have found that "Can't use phone" is almost equivalent to "Annoying non-profitable Customer"
tpetry: I do understand why all these steps are required. And they are good. But how should zero-trust architecture solve that? You‘re still authenticated what the core problem is.
nine_k: Zero-trust architecture just can work without a VPN, unless the network is blocked. Otherwise everything should be similar.
Lord_Zero: Do you need to disable biometrics if you simply reboot? my Pixel 10 Pro XL wont let me in without pin after reboot. Biometrics wont work until that first unlock.
mindslight: Does iCloud not blast you with a bunch of "2FA" hassles the way Google does? That passwords are no longer complete account credentials makes this approach a non-starter, unless you want to come up with some protocol with a trusted person who stays home (with access to your account) and can perform those verification steps for you.Even so I would still be worried about the nonstandard behavior causing my Apple/Google account to get straight up locked by their arbitrary and capricious "security" systems.
raw_anon_1111: Passkeys are stored in your Apple Keychain. I don’t think you have to go through 2FA if you use a Passkey with Google.I can throw my iPhone in the ocean, go to the nearest cell phone store/Apple Store and log into my Apple account and you won’t be able to tell the difference between my old phone and new phone.
Brian_K_White: It's so wierd to perceive that as arrogance. Actually "wierd" is being too nice.
