Immigration Lawyer's Phone Search Blocked by Boston Judge

A federal judge in Boston has blocked the government from reading data copied from an immigration lawyer’s phone at Logan International Airport, finding the lawyer is likely to prove the seizure was retaliation for his public criticism of ICE. The preliminary injunction for Boston attorney Andrew Lattarulo reaches beyond one case: it links a claimed border search to a Form I-9 workplace investigation of his own law firm, and it questions whether agents can use a trip abroad to gather evidence for a domestic inquiry.

U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs granted the injunction on Thursday, according to Newsweek, the only established outlet so far to report the ruling. She ordered the government to keep the copied data “in its current unreadable and unreviewable format until the case concludes,” Newsweek reported, but declined to order it destroyed. She did not decide whether the seizure violated the Fourth Amendment.

How an I-9 audit led to the seizure of an immigration lawyer’s phone

The case, Lattarulo v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-12861, has been in court since October 2025. According to Lattarulo’s verified complaint, he flew home from Aruba on Sept. 28, 2025, cleared U.S. Customs and Border Protection preclearance there that morning, and was stopped hours later as he left the gate area of Terminal C, a domestic terminal at Logan. Agents who said they were conducting a border search took his business iPhone after he told them it held privileged client communications. The complaint cites his Instagram know-your-rights videos, a 2025 television interview and a Sept. 9, 2025 video criticizing a federal enforcement operation in Boston, and notes the seizure came 19 days after that last video. The ABA Journal reported that Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order on Oct. 3, 2025.

The new ruling fills in the government’s side of the timeline. As Newsweek described it, Homeland Security Investigations served Lattarulo’s firm, Georges Cote LLP, a Notice of Inspection, the formal start of a Form I-9 audit, on Sept. 8, 2025, and a Notice of Suspect Documents on Sept. 25. An HSI policy generally gives employers 10 business days to address questions about employees’ work authorization. The phone was seized three days later, fully copied and returned eight days after that. Lattarulo’s partner, who had the same or greater access to the firm’s records and crossed the border a day earlier, was not searched.

“That aggressive deviation from protocol strongly suggests that the seizure did not arise from an ordinary investigative motive,” Burroughs wrote, as quoted by Newsweek. She added that the government appeared to have “seized on a fortuitous border crossing” to look for evidence of a domestic matter it was already investigating.

The government denied any retaliation. Its lawyers said the seizure was connected to an HSI inquiry into whether the firm employed workers without authorization, relied on its border search authority, told the court it had additional evidence it would not disclose publicly, and said a separate “taint team” would screen privileged material if a search were later allowed.

Why the First Amendment route carried the motion

The judge’s choice of grounds is the part practitioners should study. Phone searches at the border rest on government-friendly law in Boston. The First Circuit, whose rulings bind the court there, held in Alasaad v. Mayorkas in 2021 that border searches of electronic devices require neither a warrant nor probable cause. That leaves a Fourth Amendment challenge facing a steep climb, and explains why a retaliation claim built on timing, and on how agents treated Lattarulo compared with his partner, did the work. It is the same airport where CBP’s stop of Harvard researcher Kseniia Petrova turned into a federal criminal case that prosecutors have since moved to drop.

The ruling has limits. A preliminary injunction is a forecast of who is likely to win, not a final judgment, and the government can ask the First Circuit to review it. The open question is whether the preclearance facts, an inspection completed abroad followed by a stop in a domestic terminal, eventually force the court to decide where border search authority ends.

The practical effect is clearer. Employers under an I-9 audit, law firms included, generally get 10 business days under HSI policy to answer work-authorization questions, and this ruling treats a sharp departure from it as evidence of motive. For lawyers who carry client files on their phones, data security was already a live issue after the Outlook outage that left law firms exposed; they now have a court finding that an agency’s choice of whom to search can be tested against the searched person’s speech. Courts remain uneven on how closely to police enforcement tactics: an Oregon suit over attorney access to ICE detainees was dropped after an injunction loss, while a Minnesota judge found a warrantless ICE arrest of a former DACA recipient unlawful.

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

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Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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