Returning from aid trip to Cuba, Americans have phones seized at US airport

Members of a convoy that delivered humanitarian aid to Cuba were detained and interrogated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) upon returning to the United States on a charter flight from Havana. Of the 20 US citizens who were pulled for secondary inspection at Miami International Airport on Wednesday morning, 18 had their phones and other devices seized by CBP, with little information given on whether and when they’ll get them back.

The group was part of a larger coalition of activists who traveled in waves to Cuba as part of the Nuestra América Convoy, named after an essay by nineteenth-century Cuban intellectual José Martí criticizing US dominance of the Americas. The convoy included 650 delegates from 33 countries, and delivered an estimated 20 tons of aid to the island nation. Some members of the convoy traveled to Cuba by sea on a 75-foot-long fishing boat that departed from Mexico loaded with rice, beans, canned food, baby formula, bicycles, and solar panels to distribute to Cuban organizations on the ground. Others chartered flights, many of which left from and returned to Miami. One delegation, led by the activist group CODEPINK, said it carried 6,300 pounds of medicine and other medical supplies valued at $433,000. The 20 people who were detained on Monday all traveled together as part of the CODEPINK delegation.

These supplies were intended to alleviate the effects of the ongoing US blockade on oil exports to Cuba. The Trump administration has been blocking Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba since the January capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, though Reuters reports that the State Department has allowed a limited number of fuel exports to Cuba’s private sector. The shortage has plunged the already struggling nation into crisis: the island has been plagued by rolling blackouts. Food is rotting in refrigerators, trash is piling up on the streets because there isn’t enough fuel to collect it, and Cubans have been forced to live in the dark while a few businesses run on US-provided oil. Cuba’s universal healthcare system has been hit especially hard: the New York Times reports that hospital patients are dying due to a lack of resources, and doctors tell the paper that these deaths would otherwise be preventable if not for the fuel shortage.

The convoy included a number of high-profile activists, including leftist streamer Hasan Piker and Chris Smalls, the Amazon worker who helped organize a strike at a New York City facility in 2020. Smalls was among those who had their devices seized.

“There was a charter flight that went out yesterday that went by pretty seamlessly,” Olivia DiNucci, an organizer at the left-leaning pacifist organization CODEPINK, told The Verge on Wednesday. DiNucci was one of the 20 members of the convoy who was pulled aside for secondary screening. “There were a couple people who were detained, but it was pretty quick and — in quotes — ‘normal’ racial profiling that happened. But right when we got off the plane, 20 of us got taken in.”

DiNucci said her name was called before she walked up to the customs desk. All 20 people were pulled into secondary inspection and then questioned individually. Some of the questions were standard: DiNucci said she was asked what she was doing in Cuba, how long she was there, where she was staying, who she was with, what she does for work, where she lives, and for her phone number. But some members of the group who have relatives in Venezuela, Mexico, and Cuba were asked about their families, according to DiNucci.

“They asked other people about their family in Cuba, their work that they did in Venezuela,” DiNucci said. “One agent was like, ‘Cubans want Marco Rubio to be in power,’” and was “bashing the fact that we brought aid that the government was just going to take.”

CBP did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

DiNucci said the customs agents gave the group two options: they could unlock and hand over their phones for inspection, or their devices would be seized. DiNucci said she and one other person voluntarily gave over their phones. The other 18 people had their devices confiscated. Agents also looked through people’s notebooks and journals, and photographed the contents. DiNucci’s phone was in airplane mode, and she thinks agents looked through her photos. “I had all my messaging apps, all my emails, everything deleted” before going through customs, she said. At one point, the phone was taken out of her sight; she doesn’t know what the agents did with it then.

Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild, told The Verge that these types of phone searches aren’t new, and are often used against activists. The guild is giving the members of the convoy information about their rights and is working to help get their phones back.

“We know that the US, above all, does this to intimidate, but I am confident these activists will not be intimidated and will continue to stand in solidarity with Cuba as they endure this inhumane US blockade,” Adely said. “We intend to pressure the government to return their phones immediately, and there is a way to demand redress for the impact of what we consider to be an unlawful search and seizure.”

A Cuban-American member of the convoy, who asked that her name be withheld for professional reasons, said she traveled with a burner phone. “I felt anxious about it,” she said. “You hear things about getting searched, so I didn’t want to chance it.”

She traveled through Miami and returned to the US last week without incident. She suspects she made it through easily because she has Global Entry, a trusted traveler program run by CBP. Other members of her group were pulled aside, and some had their devices searched, she said.

Growing up in a Cuban-American family, she said, she was often warned about repression in Cuba. “I’ve always been warned against Cuba being a heavy surveillance state,” she said, “but I can’t think of one bigger than the United States.”

The Trump administration has threatened to impose tariffs on any country that ships fuel to Cuba. Earlier this week, a Russian tanker carrying an estimated 730,000 barrels of crude oil traveled through the English Channel, escorted by a Russian warship. At an international conference in February, several Caribbean countries pledged to send humanitarian aid to Cuba and called for a deescalation of tensions between the US and the island nation.

The Cuban-American member of the convoy who spoke to The Verge said its purpose was to help civilians who are struggling as a result of the blockade. “I think that ultimately, people went because they wanted to help people,” she said. “And I think at the end of the day, that was the mission.”

Warrantless searches of people’s phones typically violate the Fourth Amendment, with one glaring exception: searches conducted at ports of entry, including airports. The Supreme Court held in 2014 that these searches “are reasonable simply because they occur at the border.”

CBP conducts two types of device searches: “basic” inspections like the one that happened to DiNucci, where agents can look at anything on a person’s phone that is available offline, and more advanced forensic inspections. Warrantless forensic searches are allowed at some ports of entry and prohibited in others, thanks to a patchwork of federal rulings with different outcomes.

Travelers can refuse to have their devices searched, but for people who aren’t US citizens, this could mean being denied entry into the country. Citizens who refuse searches may have their devices taken, which is what happened to 18 members of the convoy who traveled through Miami on Wednesday.

CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin, a member of the convoy who returned to the US via Miami on March 23rd, said she and most others in her group entered without incident. “I was asked just a couple of questions, and that was it, and that was the case for most of the people,” she said. Five people in her group were pulled aside for secondary screening, but they were only held for about half an hour.

But Benjamin said she’s had trouble getting the word out about how dire conditions in Cuba have become.

Benjamin said authorities in Miami hampered her group’s ability to hold a press conference ahead of the trip; officials denied their permit. The US policy toward Cuba appears to follow the logic that “to liberate the Cuban people, we must inflict enough pain that they will rise up,” she said. “It’s such an ideological policy that doesn’t talk about the people and the real needs of people.”