DHS bends a customs-import statute into a warrantless surveillance tool

The Department of Homeland Security has been invoking 19 USC 1509 — a provision meant to let it inspect records when auditing duties and taxes on imported goods — to pull private data on journalists, unions, and non-profits without a judge’s approval. The maneuver requires only sign-off from a DHS official, and the summonses typically come with a gag order barring the recipient company from telling the target. Legal experts, including a former DHS inspector general and an ex-agency lawyer, call it a clear abuse: none of the cited matters involve customs violations.

The pattern is starkest in Minneapolis, where prosecutors twice failed to get warrants for the YouTube accounts of journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon after a judge found no probable cause and demanded the two be given a chance to object. Weeks later, DHS simply routed around that ruling, serving Google a 1509 summons for the same data. It also obtained six months of Fort’s phone records from T-Mobile — over 10,000 calls and texts — without notifying her, the kind of communications log that can expose a reporter’s confidential sources. The agency has similarly targeted YouTube data tied to Democracy Now, Megyn Kelly, and others, and pulled financial and Venmo records for the Sunrise Movement, SEIU, CWA, and a racial-justice nonprofit, none of them charged with any crime.

The significance is structural: the Fourth Amendment normally forces the government to show a judge probable cause before seizing records, and the 1509 route deletes that check entirely. Because companies aren’t required to notify users and the summonses stay sealed unless challenged, there’s no reliable count of how often DHS uses the tactic — the New York Times reported hundreds of administrative subpoenas to social platforms in February alone. That opacity, civil-liberties lawyers warn, leaves courts, Congress, and the public with no way to police an executive-branch power increasingly aimed at protected First Amendment speech.