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Samuel Tunick, who faces a felony charge for deleting his phone’s data during an airport customs search, called the government’s peering into people’s private lives “creepy.”
Samuel Tunick was returning to the United States in January 2025 from a vacation in the Dominican Republic when he was pulled aside during a customs search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Customs and Border Protection officers wanted to search his phone. After questioning, he eventually turned it over but gave officers a passcode that then erased the contents of his Google Pixel phone.
As result, federal prosecutors in Atlanta have charged him with obstruction.
The case of Mr. Tunick, 30, became widely known last month after news reports of his federal court hearing in Atlanta. Mr. Tunick, a musician who has taught at a Jewish day school and tutored students, is also a left-wing activist and a graduate student in geography at Georgia State University.
He said that he has been ensnared by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include crimes like getting in the way of immigration enforcement.
His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered.
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