Cristian Farias:

Welcome to The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump versus the First Amendment. I’m your host, legal journalist, Cristian Farias. This show exists because freedom of speech is under assault, and the attacks are coming from inside the house, the White House. Every week, we’ll keep up what’s going on in this realm and show you how people and communities are fighting back. This week, we’ll talk about smartphones.

We literally carry our entire lives on our devices, from our selfies to our innermost secrets. As such, the constitution protects them from government intrusion. That’s true everywhere, except one place, the border. And the border, it turns out, is more than just the invisible line separating the U.S. from Mexico and Canada. It’s everywhere, in all 50 states. Why does the First Amendment still matter in this law-free zone?

Amir Makled:

I knew that at the border, government has the ability to seize your device. I knew that coming in. I’ve almost known that, but I’ve never experienced this before.

Cristian Farias:

But before I speak with this week’s guests, let’s recap some of the First Amendment stories, blowing up our smartphone notifications. NPR and a group of member stations sued the Trump administration under the First Amendment, challenging an executive order, aimed at pulling funding from the public broadcaster and accusing it of bias. In the ongoing war between Harvard and the Trump administration, which has pulled all the stops to destroy the university, and that’s not hyperbole, a judge promptly blocked the government’s attempt to revoke the school’s ability to host international students, but the administration is still at it, moving separately to cancel all government contracts with the Ivy League. Separately, the State Department, which is at the center of the crackdown on international students and pro-Palestinian activists, halted all interviews for student and exchange visas abroad, and has announced an expanded scrutiny of visa applicants’ social media activity. Presumably, anyone who has said mean things about the president, or maybe even Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, won’t get to study in the U.S..

But wait, there’s more. Marco Rubio is really on a tear this week. He also announced on Wednesday that the government will work “Aggressively” to revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist party, or those working in so-called critical fields. It’s giving Chinese Exclusion Act. I invite you to Google it. It’s part of our nation’s dark immigration history. I expect lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate Marco Rubio personally singled out for deportation, is still in detention. Crucially, the federal judge was slowly and methodically considering his case. Too slowly and too methodically, in my journalistic opinion, ruled on Wednesday, that the law used to justify his deportation case is likely unconstitutionally vague under the First Amendment. That’s a big conclusion, and one that can really boost the cases of other students being targeted under the same law. With so many changes and announcements affecting people entering, living in, or wishing to come to the U.S., citizens and non-citizens alike, we thought it would be a good time to talk about one issue that’s commonplace for anyone who travels, the possibility that you or your staff will be searched at the border.

Searches at ports of entry happened routinely and have become more intrusive since 9/11. In particular, electronic device searches at the border have been U.S. policy since 2008, so this could happen to any of us one day, even more so, since we all started carrying our entire digital lives in our pockets. To talk about what the state of the law is around device searches at the border and why we should think about this as a First Amendment problem is Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. He recently argued a case in the Second Circuit, dealing precisely with this topic. It’s great to have you, Scott.

Scott Wilkens:

It’s great to be here. Thanks so much, Cristian.

Cristian Farias:

Now, Scott, this is a show about the First Amendment, but to understand why its protections apply to smartphones and other devices, we need to talk about the Fourth Amendment first. I want you to take it away and explain that to me.

Scott Wilkens:

Sure. The Fourth Amendment is like the First Amendment, one of the most important protections of individual rights in the Constitution. And basically, what it says is that it prohibits the government from engaging in unreasonable searches and seizures, and that would apply, for example, to your home, your car. And the Supreme Court has said that when law enforcement is trying to engage in a search or seizure, the basic rule is they have to get a warrant. There are exceptions to that rule, and we’ll be talking about one of those, the border search exception, but in general, there’s this warrant requirement.

Now, the First Amendment comes in in a couple of ways. The First Amendment can be a standalone legal claim. So even without the Fourth Amendment, it violates the First Amendment to search someone’s cellphone, but in the Fourth Amendment context, the First Amendment sort of adds sort of extra bite, if you will, because the Supreme Court has said that when the government is trying to search information that is expressive, so for example, looking through a diary or a book, a physical book in the olden days, that the Fourth Amendment requirement has to be applied with what the court has said is scrupulous exactitude. So the First Amendment provides some extra bite with respect to the Fourth Amendment analysis here.

Cristian Farias:

The federal government searches a lot of devices at the border annually, more than 40,000, according to figures from 2023. Now, a person might say,  “Well, 40,000 is a big number,” but hundreds of millions of people travel in and out of the United States every year, so maybe it’s a drop in the bucket. Why should we care about that?

Scott Wilkens:

That’s certainly what the government says in these cases. The government says, “Look, yeah, 40,000,” but there are so many millions of people coming in. I mean, I think maybe it’s hundreds of millions a year, so this really isn’t anything. But I think it is really significant, and we, at the Night Institute, through a FOIA request, we obtained a lot of documents from travelers who complained about the kinds of questions they were being asked, the sort of steps they’re being put through while their phones were taken away from them in order to get them back, and so at least some of the 40,000 have taken the time to lodge their complaints. But I think the real issue here is that the government has so much power, and people just want to get where they’re going, and so I think a lot of those folks just put up with it because they want to get through and they don’t want to be held up any longer, and that’s why we’re not seeing more complaints than we are.

Cristian Farias:

Scott, part of the reason we’re here and why the border search exception is a thing is because there’s this legal fiction that the border is everywhere, literally in all 50 states. For someone who is listening to this for the first time, can you please explain how the border is in all 50 states? That makes no sense to the average person.

Scott Wilkens:

Yes. So the border includes, not just land borders and waterway borders, but also international airports, international ports of entry. And so these cases from the sort of New York area, they generally are coming from Kennedy Airport, from Newark International Airport. That’s how these cases are arising. There are cases coming out of O’Hare.

That’s generally where these cases come from. They don’t come from people crossing the Canadian border or the Mexican border. They come from airports.

Cristian Farias:

You’ve been litigating these issues for a long time, and you’ve alluded to Riley v. California, which is the Supreme Court case that established that the government needs a warrant before attempting to search your phone or your device. Now, why is it that this case from more than 10 years ago hasn’t caught up to device searches at the border?

Scott Wilkens:

It’s certainly troubling that it hasn’t, but Riley, which by the way, was a unanimous decision, a different court, different justices, but still conservatives and the liberal justices, that case involved this one exception to the warrant requirement called the search incident to arrest. When you’re being arrested, the officers can pat you down and search you for a couple of different reasons, but the court said they cannot go through your cellphone in that situation. The decision is very carefully reasoned. It goes into great detail about all the kinds of things we have on our cellphones, and that decision really should apply to these border cases, but, I think the lower courts have largely said the border is different. Somehow the view is you have less privacy expectation at the border than you do when you’re getting arrested.

I don’t think that makes any sense, but that is what a number of lower courts have said and why they have basically said, “You know, Riley. Yeah, there’s Riley, but we’re not going to apply it in the border context.” And that’s something we, at the Knight Institute, have been trying to get courts to pay more attention to for a long time.

Cristian Farias:

The law hasn’t caught up, but it looks like a judge in New York kind of make history recently in this area and kind of went the other way. Tell me about that case.

Scott Wilkens:

Yes. So there are actually two cases, both from New York in which the judge held that a warrant is required to search a cellphone at the border, and that’s very important. I mean, they are the, I believe the only two courts that have said that. And one of them, the Knight Institute, put in an amicus brief at the district court level, and the judge spent quite a bit of time, in her opinion, talking about the First Amendment and cited our brief and talked about our arguments, and that is also the first case in which a judge has spent time in the Fourth Amendment context, talking about First amendment rights, how important they are and why they support a warrant requirement in this context.

Cristian Farias:

Scott, this case in the Second Circuit is a criminal case, that is as a result of a device search, the government found evidence that they later used to incriminate the defendant in a criminal prosecution. Do you think that that contributes to the public perception that these cases perhaps aren’t as important? They might say, “Well, I’m not a criminal, so I shouldn’t worry about the government putting me in prison for something on my phone.” But maybe we shouldn’t be thinking in those terms.

Scott Wilkens:

I don’t know how much it matters to public perception, because I don’t know how much people are paying attention to these cases. However, I think it does matter to judges’ perceptions and court’s perceptions because if they are seeing these cases only in the criminal context, trying to keep the courts focused on the broader implications for journalists and for all travelers is difficult. And that’s one thing that I really tried to do, arguing before the Second Circuit a couple of months ago, was to make sure the court was aware, not just of the criminal defendant in that case, whose rights, of course, are very important, but also how the government’s policy affects all travelers and journalists.

Cristian Farias:

You argued these issues before the Second Circuit a few weeks ago in focus in part on the implications of warrantless device searches for press freedom. Now, is this case related to that federal judge’s ruling that you mentioned?

Scott Wilkens:

Yes, it’s related, and actually, this is kind of almost unheard of. There are right now three cases pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that all raised this issue about cellphone searches at the border. And so you have three different panels of Second Circuit judges that are hearing these cases.

Cristian Farias:

Interesting.

Scott Wilkens:

And so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. The case that I argued in will probably be the first of these cases that gets decided by the Second Circuit.

Cristian Farias:

Could you tell me why that argument that you made is important, especially in the context of press freedom and the protections that journalists should have in this context?

Scott Wilkens:

All travelers are burdened by this claimed government authority to search our cellphones, but this is especially burdensome on journalists and the role that they play in our civil society because journalists depend on being able to communicate with interview sources to be able to guarantee some level of confidentiality. And when those sources know that those journalists’ phones can be searched when they’re coming through the border, that, of course, will make them less likely to speak with journalists. You also have just the journalists themselves, that their own thinking, writing, knowing that the government might be looking at that might retaliate against them for being critical of the government, also burdens freedom of the press. So that’s a particular group of people coming through the border who are especially at risk because of this policy.

Cristian Farias:

The Supreme Court that decided Riley, you kind of alluded to this, and even the one that decided Carpenter, another important electronic surveilling case, looks very different today. Now, I don’t want you to make a prediction or to speculate, but are you hopeful that the Supreme Court, the current court, will ultimately do the right thing here?

Scott Wilkens:

I am hopeful, and there are a couple of reasons for that. With respect to the court’s kind of ideological lines or political leanings, the First Amendment is an area that, I think for good reasons, often kind of crosses party lines, crosses political lines, ideological lines. There is just a very strong commitment, I think, by the court, in general, to protect First Amendment rights, and so I’m hopeful that in this case, just like in the Riley case, yes, a different court, but still unanimous. I hope this case will draw enough justices to require a warrant in this situation. But as you say, it is very hard to predict, and it’s possible they could go the other way.

Cristian Farias:

In fact, I believe, during the first Trump administration, we saw a number of cases of journalists who were covering the border, who were traveling with migrants, who would then get stopped and get their devices either seized or searched, and you can see how that really smells foul, especially when journalists are trying to draw a light on human rights abuses and other kinds of policies that the administration is trying to put forward in our names.

Scott Wilkens:

That’s right. And one thing I want to say, Cristian, is that you mentioned these policies have been in place since 2008, 2009, and that’s true, but they’ve been used more and more, year on year. If you look at the figures, you mentioned the 40,000 number. If you look at that data, it increases year on year, and of course, we heard quite a bit in the beginning of this second Trump administration about increased surveillance of cellphones at the border, a number of people that were allegedly turned away because of anti-Trump administration speech found on their cellphones, and so we haven’t seen the data yet. I’m not sure it’ll even be reported by the government, but it does seem like these searches have been increasing markedly during the second Trump administration. So I think it’s an area of special concern.

Cristian Farias:

Given this uncertainty in the fact that the law is up in the air, what would you say to a journalist, a lawyer, or maybe even a regular person who may wish to take precautions with their devices?

Scott Wilkens:

There are a number of civil rights and civil liberties groups that, especially under the second Trump administration, have been putting out guidelines on how best to protect your information. And one thing I know that many people are doing is they are not taking their normal cellphone with them. They are taking a burner phone that’s empty, or they may kind of try to empty their own cellphone, and then re-upload content when they get overseas, or when they come back. So there are ways to travel, also with your laptop, travel with a so-called clean device so that even if the government stops you and tries to search your devices, there won’t be any of your sensitive, personal, or other information for them to look through.

Cristian Farias:

Talk about a good reason to not take your phone on vacation, like many of us do unfortunately, and to come back and not be searched at the border by agents who want to look through your stuff. Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Scott, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Scott Wilkens:

Thanks. Pleasure talking with you too, Cristian.

Cristian Farias:

That was Scott Wilkens with the Knight Institute. As he just pointed out, the law is up in the air, and precisely for that reason, there have been stories of journalists, advocates, even lawyers, having their electronic devices seized and searched. One of them is Amir Makled. The National spotlight was in Amir last month, when he had an unexpected encounter with government agents at the airport on his way back from vacation. He happens to be a civil rights attorney, who represents pro-Palestinian student protesters in Michigan.

Of course, there’s nothing remarkable about that, but what is remarkable about his case is that border agents knew exactly who he was when they stopped him. We’ll talk about that wild experience and so much more. Welcome to the show, Amir.

Amir Makled:

Well, thank you so much, Cristian, for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Cristian Farias:

Now, Amir, you’re very open about your pro bono representation of pro-Palestine student protesters. Why are these cases so important to you?

Amir Makled:

It’s an issue of First Amendment rights. First and foremost, I am an Arab American, so I do feel confident in supporting people who have, or are suffering from that community, because my friends, my family, everybody that I know has some connection to the Middle East and is suffering tremendously, but beyond that is a First Amendment issue. We have the right to protest, and we should use our voice in a peaceful manner to protest when we’re seeing wrongs happening in front of our eyes. And so when students are being targeted for speaking out and asking for divestment at a university level, it’s inappropriate. I think that their social media shouldn’t be surveyed. They shouldn’t be followed from classroom to classroom to see where they’re going and who they’re meeting with, and they shouldn’t be charged criminally if they’re going to engage in a peaceful protest, asking for divestment.

These are not new issues. They certainly shouldn’t be subjected to removal proceedings if they’re non-citizens and they’re here on a student visa. These are core First Amendment rights in our country, in the United States. How are we setting apart one particular speech from another? This is all wrong. And so I’m a firm believer that those rights should be defended, and people who are criminally charged for exercising their free speech deserve to have adequate representation, and I’m happy to offer it.

Cristian Farias:

Can you tell me about your client, Samantha Lewis, whom you’ve successfully represented against your state?

Amir Makled:

Yeah. So Sammy was charged two times in two separate felony counts for two separate protests, all stemming at the University of Michigan. Sammy’s an activist. She’s somebody that’s been very involved in the anti-war movement, and was very involved even during the Black Lives Matter movement in a few years ago. And so she’s somebody that’s really outspoken and has a firm compass in terms of what she believes is right.

She was initially involved in organizing the encampment in May of 2024 at the University of Michigan, and the students in that university were encamped in the Diag. The Diag is kind of like the center campus. It’s a public space. It’s not in any classrooms or any buildings. It doesn’t really interact with other school activities or things of that nature.

So for the 30-day period that they were there, there was really no issue in terms of interrupting class or any issues of violence. Nobody got into fights over there. Nobody had any real problems at all, and that the university, from time to time, would send over representatives to discuss what the encampment leaders, what it is that they wanted in order for the encampment to be disassembled. And the message was clear, “We want to meet with the Board of Regents, and we want to discuss divestment.” And in each and every moment, that was rejected or non-responsive from the school administration.

These students were peacefully protesting at the encampment. It was 5:30 in the morning when multiple law enforcement agencies from Campus Safety to local police to state police, in a multi-jurisdictional type law enforcement task force, came and showed up at 5:30 in the morning in riot gear, wearing full uniforms, face shields, masks, armed with batons and mace or pepper spray, and started busting up this encampment, and anybody that stood in their way was either hit with a baton, arrested, or maced with pepper spray. There was no violence until the police showed up, and anybody that resisted was charged with a felony. And so that’s why we believe that these were charges that were overzealous and selectively prosecuted. And we raised that issue and fought very hard at the preliminary stages of this case until the attorney general’s office just gave it up.

Cristian Farias:

That’s a great setup for, I guess, the meat of our conversation, which is what you encounter when you were arriving from vacation back in April. I want you to tell me, from beginning to end, what your experience was, and just to relive that moment.

Amir Makled:

Absolutely. So we had just come back from a five-day vacation for spring break. My daughters are two and nine-year-old girls, and my wife and I decided we’re going to take this short vacation as a family. And it’s very important for us to have these kind of moments where the kids can have a good time and we can enjoy a family moment together, but we arrived back home on a Sunday night at Detroit Metro Airport. So it was about 7:00 PM.

And as I was approaching the passport desk, or the border patrol, or border control desk, the agent scanned my passport, and then asked another agent if there was a TTRT agent available. And I didn’t know what that acronym meant. So at that moment, I pulled out my phone, and I decided to ask or Google, “What is a TTRT agent?” It turns out it meant Tactical Terrorism Response Team. And at that moment, I knew I’m being targeted, or I’m being randomly selected.

So I told my wife they’re going to take me in for secondary screening, and she didn’t know what that meant. I’m like, “They’re going to detain me.” She goes, “Well, how do you know?” “I heard the agent say TTRT. I looked it up and look what it means.”

So I show her my phone, and she’s like, “Oh, boy, what’s that about?” I said, “I don’t know. Let’s wait and see.” Sure enough, another agent comes out and asks us to follow them. We go into a secondary screening office.

This is a room that’s kind of off to the side. Nobody that’s normally traveling is going to be entering this room. You have to be escorted in, and it’s a locked door with a badge, and even if you wanted to exit, it’s also locked. So at this point, I’m not free to leave. They have my passport, and for all intents and purposes, I’m detained, and my family member is detained.

So we sat in a kind of like a lobby area for a few moments. Another agent came to me and greeted me, said, “Mr. Makled.” I said, “Yes.” “We’d like to ask you a few questions.” I said, “Well, are my family members free to go?”

And they said, “Well, do they have their passports?” I said, “Well, you guys have them.” He went, got my passports for the kids and my wife, and they said, “Okay, they can leave, but you have to stay.” So I tell my wife, I said, “Look, this is the best case scenario for me. You guys keep it going.”

“Take off. I’ll stay back. I’ll have you pick me up later on.”

Cristian Farias:

Did they leave or did they-

Amir Makled:

Reluctantly, I asked my wife to do it, and she did. But at that moment, it was better for me because my dad hat is off, and now my lawyer hat comes back on. And so I’m way more comfortable dealing with this government agent, knowing that my wife and kids aren’t worried and waiting for me, and not knowing what could potentially happen. So they left. I was then escorted to another smaller room, a little, kind of maybe 10 feet by 10 feet type small interview room.

And so they led immediately with, “We know that you’re an attorney and we know that you’re taking on some higher profile cases.” And that was a direct reference to the student protester cases I was dealing with, because it had recently been in the news quite often. These protester cases at the University of Michigan were something that we issued press releases about, and we were in the news locally all the time.

Cristian Farias:

So they had a dossier on you basically?

Amir Makled:

Oh, absolutely. The agent told me, “I looked you up. You have a very good track record.” He even mentioned to me, “Oh, you’re kind of a famous lawyer.” I said, “Man, I’m not famous. I’m just doing my job, and I’m not signing autographs in the airport.”

“What is it that you need? Why are you stopping me?” At that point, he asked for my phone. He said, “Is your phone with you?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, we want to look at it.”

I knew that at the border, government has the ability to seize your device. I knew that coming in, I’ve always known that, but I’ve never experienced this before. So my first reaction to him was, “No. You guys know I’m a lawyer. You’ve done your research on me.”

“You said you looked me up. You know who I am and what I do. Everything on my phone could be privileged, and I have a lot of client communications and information. You’re not just getting my cellphone. I’m not giving it to you.”

And so at that point, he seemed perplexed. He wanted to go talk to a supervisor about what to do in this situation.

Cristian Farias:

I guess he wasn’t used to that resistance.

Amir Makled:

But I’m used to confronting government, so I wasn’t really too worried, because I knew they weren’t going to be able to deny me, coming into the United States. I mean, they can’t deport me back to Detroit where I was born. Big deal, you know? So for me, I said no. He went and talked to a supervisor, and I learned this later on, that if somebody invokes privilege at the border, whether they’re attorneys, doctors, journalists, some form of privilege, they must engage with a supervisor, and that supervisor must review exactly why that person is being stopped.

And so I did the right move. It was my gut reaction, but it turned out to be the correct one. They came back, and they gave me a legal pad, and they said, “Okay, write down what you believe is privileged. We won’t look at that stuff, but we’re going to look at everything else.” And I was so dumbfounded by that.

I said, “What are you talking about? This is an iPhone. I have emails going back almost 15 years. I’ve got files on there, I’ve got text messages. My whole life is in there.”

“How am I going to sit here and tell you this is privileged, this isn’t privileged, that’s privileged. This is ridiculous. I’m not able to do that.”

Cristian Farias:

That makes me laugh because I’m a journalist, and I could imagine an agent asking me that and to go through my cellphone and say, “Okay, which ones are sources? Which ones are not sources?” And I’m like, “You can’t do that.”

Amir Makled:

Yeah, right.

Cristian Farias:

Like, “Are you kidding me?”

Amir Makled:

It’s crazy. Yeah. So at that point, I said, “Look, everything. And how could everything be privileged?” So we did this 20 minutes back and forth.

“What about the photos in your phone? Are those privileged?” I said, “What if a client screenshotted something to me and I saved it in my photo album?” “How am I supposed to know that this isn’t sent from a client?” So yes, everything is privileged.

What if I’m investigating one of my cases, and I went to a crime scene, or I went to a client’s facility, and I wanted to document something, I took photos of it? Yeah, these are work product. These are issues that need to be kept, and I have an obligation as a lawyer to do so. And so it went beyond just, “Could it be privileged or could it not?” My answer to them was everything.

And so it seemed clear to me that after every answer I gave them, he wanted to come up with another excuse as to why to take my device, and I didn’t want to be in the position where they were going to ultimately just take my device anyways. So when we got to the question of, “What about your contact list, just the people who you store in your phone?,” I said, “Okay. If I show you my contact list, will you let me leave? Will you give me my device back, and I can get out of here?” And he said, “Yes, we can agree to that.”

I said, “Okay.” So at that point, I wrote down, “You can look at my contact list only. That’s not privileged. Everything else is privileged in my phone.” So they took my device for five, seven minutes max, so just a few minutes, and they came back.

So I don’t know if they dumped my whole device or not. I don’t know if they have a way to separate just my contact list, or they did a manual search through my phone to look at my contact list, or whether it was plugged into a device and it was just downloaded. I don’t know. It didn’t seem like it was long enough to download my whole device because it was only five to seven minutes. So I’m hoping that it was just a manual search, but I would have no idea otherwise.

Cristian Farias:

That’s kind of scary either way, the fact that they kind of walked away from your presence, and you just have to kind of pinky promise that they’re going to just look at your contact list and nothing else.

Amir Makled:

Exactly. It is. It is scary. And that’s one of the main reasons why I wrote down what I wrote down and gave it to them, so that if something ever does come up, and they did go beyond the scope of the consent that I gave them, I would have at least some argument to make in a court that they didn’t have authority to go that far. They didn’t have consent from me to look at anything beyond the contact list.

And so that was one of my legal tactics that I wanted to, at least give myself an argument, in the event something wrong did happen. When they came back, they asked me questions about these contacts. They almost like they were prepared and had a list of individuals they wanted to talk to me about. And so that, I found to be extremely inappropriate, because I knew who those folks were. Certainly, they’re in my contact list, and I’m sure they knew who they were or had reasons as to why they wanted to ask me about these individuals, but I certainly wasn’t going to give up any info about who they were to me or what I knew about them.

And so I told them, “Look, anybody that’s in my phone is a friend, family member, or a client, and that’s all you’re going to get out of me.”

Cristian Farias:

So after that happened, what was the end of it?

Amir Makled:

So at that point, they gave me my device back. I was escorted back out of the detainment room, or this whatever customs and border protection room was, and they escorted me out to the lobby, where somebody could pick you up. At that point, the whole airport terminal had been cleared out. Nobody was left. I was the last person there.

I’d been there for almost two hours. My wife had left, obviously. I called for her to come back. My dad came and picked me up, and I asked this agent on the way out. I said, “Am I going to get stopped again?”

“Am I going to have to deal with this now? Is this something that I should be prepared for every time that I’m coming internationally?” He said, “I don’t know. I have a box to check. I have a report to write.”

“I’m going to write this report, and if the next agent is satisfied, they won’t stop you, but if they want to ask more questions, they will.” And so I knew at that point, I need to be better prepared and have a game plan moving forward when I’m traveling internationally.

Cristian Farias:

Have you heard from other lawyers, and what advice do you give them now?

Amir Makled:

So since all this has happened, I’ve actually been training other attorneys about border searches. I’ve worked with the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on putting together some seminars. I’ve conducted probably three or four already. I have more coming through the pipeline. But when this initially happened, I’d spoken to my business partner and some of the more senior attorneys that are my mentors.

And I didn’t think that this was such a big deal, but their reaction to me Monday morning, when I share it to them what had happened, they were floored, and they told me that I have to say my story. I should speak out. And it went viral.

Cristian Farias:

It’s almost like you became a First Amendment advocate overnight, and I’m curious if you ever saw yourself becoming that one day.

Amir Makled:

So I never thought that I’d become strictly a First Amendment expert, or certainly wouldn’t be called on for teaching other lawyers about these issues.

Cristian Farias:

Give CLE courses-

Amir Makled:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That, coming home from Dominican, I didn’t think that that was going to be my next phase of my career. Growing up, my dad always told me, “Be careful, especially in the 9/11 area. Don’t make too much noise. Don’t be on Facebook, talking nonsense.”

“Don’t be expressing your opinions, your political positions on things. Just be careful.” And that came from a place, and I understood it to be general fatherly advice and concern. “I don’t want to see you struggle.” My dad’s from Lebanon.

My mom is from Lebanon. They saw when government oversteps, what they should do, and attack citizens, and they’ve seen Civil War. So they lived a different life experience than I have lived. But as I became an attorney and I saw that I’m in now, in a position where I can help others, and I can educate others, and I can do it in a way where my advocacy can bring a better quality of life for people that I care about, I decided I’m going to be guarded for myself individually, but be outspoken for the rights of others. And this issue that happened with me at the airport was a collaboration of both of those issues.

I wanted to protect my personal device, but after this experience happened, I wanted to explain to others that we need to be mindful that this is continuing to happen and will continue to happen in the United States.

Cristian Farias:

I’m sure you’ve heard that courage is contagious, and I imagine others have been also moved to do this kind of work that you’re doing, and to stand up for others, especially those who don’t feel emboldened to do it the way you do.

Amir Makled:

Oh, absolutely. I’ve been called, emailed. I’ve gotten postcards. Somebody sent me a postcard from Utah. Here’s a postcard on my desk.

So, I mean, it’s really cool. I’ve never received a postcard before. But a lot of encouragement, words of encouragement, a lot of support from others, attorneys and non-attorneys. And, in fact, I even spoke to a physician just this past weekend, who was in Washington D.C., and was arrested for holding a sign, and it was in a Senate hearing where Marco Rubio was speaking. And this physician was dragged out and arrested for just holding up a sign in a congressional setting.

That doctor called me and said, “Amir, you inspired me to speak out on this issue.” This is, to me, the biggest blessing or compliment that I could have ever received.

Cristian Farias:

Amir Makled, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a great conversation.

Amir Makled:

Thanks again for having me. It’s been awesome.

Cristian Farias:

That was Amir Makled, partner at Hall Makled Law in Dearborn, Michigan. And that’s a wrap for today’s show. We’ll be back with more First Amendment happenings next week, more violations, more lawlessness, more insights, more resistance and resilience. See you next week. The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

I’m your host, Cristian Farias. This episode was written by me, and co-produced by Ann Marie Awad and Candace White. Our associate producer and fact-checker for this episode is Kushal Dev. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeking. Candace White is our executive producer.

Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid Da Silva. Thanks to Scott Wilkens and Amir Makled, who joined us for this episode. The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review.

We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K, and follow us on social media.