Federal Agents Forensically Copied a U.S. Marine's Phone Without a Warrant During a Minneapolis ICE Operation

Federal Agents Cracked a Marine's Phone Without a Warrant. He's Suing.

Alex Pretti is a U.S. Marine. During a federal ICE operation in Minneapolis, agents seized his phone and performed a forensic extraction — a process that copies the entire contents of a device, including encrypted files, messages, and deleted data. No judicial warrant authorized the search.

The Receipt

The incident was reported by The Intercept in February 2026. As of April 2026, Pretti's Fourth Amendment challenge is in active federal litigation. The legal theory is straightforward: the Supreme Court ruled in Riley v. California (2014) that cell phones cannot be searched incident to arrest without a warrant. The government's position in Pretti's case has not been publicly specified beyond denying the constitutional violation.

What It Proves

Riley was decided unanimously. The court's reasoning — that a smartphone contains "the privacies of life" and is categorically different from a physical container — was not ambiguous. That federal agents performed a forensic extraction on a Marine's phone during a domestic immigration enforcement operation, without a warrant, eleven years after Riley, indicates either that the agents were unaware of controlling Supreme Court precedent or that they knowingly violated it. The ICE operation context is relevant: the Supreme Court's border-search exception does not extend to interior domestic operations in Minneapolis.