‘Stop Cop City’ activist mired in federal case after airport encounter
An encounter between a “Stop Cop City” activist and customs officers at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport highlights the clash between the public’s expectation of privacy and the government’s contention that warrantless searches of phones and other electronics help keep Americans safe.
Sam Tunick has no criminal convictions on his record. But his attorneys say Tunick’s activism against the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center motivated customs officers at the airport in January 2025 to demand his passcode so they could search his phone.
Instead of allowing agents to unlock the phone, the 30-year-old Atlantan gave them a code that deleted the phone’s contents, federal authorities say. The agents confiscated Tunick’s phone that day, but allowed him to leave the airport without charges.
Nine months later, Tunick was indicted by a federal grand jury in November and now faces a charge of destruction of property to prevent its seizure — a felony that carries up to five years in prison.
It’s a novel case that has garnered international media attention, pitting privacy rights against law enforcement’s ability to search people’s phones and electronic devices without warrants at points of entry to the U.S.
Tunick’s legal team acknowledges he gave agents a code to protect his private data from a government search, using a mobile operating system called GrapheneOS. They would not admit the code deleted the phone’s contents.
In addition to “Stop Cop City,” Tunick was involved with another movement that opposed construction of the training center, called Defend the Atlanta Forest. Tunick’s attorneys said in a court filing that the government considers Defend the Atlanta Forest an “anti-government, anti-authority violent extremist group.”
The public safety training facility was built in a DeKalb County urban forest.
In a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the agency searches electronic devices of only a fraction of arriving international travelers, taking into consideration factors such as “travel history and law enforcement alerts.”
“CBP has statutory authority to conduct border searches of electronic devices for all persons entering or departing the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud, and national security threats,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement.
Tunick, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in December, court records show. Federal prosecutors would not comment on the circumstances of his arrest, but Tunick said an Atlanta police officer pulled him over in the Virginia-Highland neighborhood as he was driving home from his job as a barista, apparently on a federal warrant. He was turned over to federal agents, and released on bond after spending a night in jail.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia, which is prosecuting Tunick, declined to answer specific questions from the AJC about the case. But U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said in a statement that obstructing law enforcement is a serious matter.
“Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions,” Hertzberg said.
A national security threat?
Tunick, a rock musician who is getting ready to start a master’s program in geosciences, said the legal proceedings are holding his future in limbo.
“I don’t have a trial date set. I don’t necessarily even expect one to happen in the next year,” Tunick said in a recent interview alongside two of his attorneys at offices of the Federal Defender Program in downtown Atlanta. “And then of course, there’s the looming threat of prison time that comes with my charges.
“Yeah, it makes it hard to plan my life and move forward in a meaningful way.”
Tunick’s legal team argues the government took advantage of its broad authority to search the belongings of people entering or leaving the U.S., including electronic devices, for reasons of national security.
They argue Tunick posed no national security threat and instead the agents were looking for information about him and others who opposed the police training center — a site of demonstrations, protests, tear gas and violence during years of construction.
Tunick has never been charged with a crime in connection with any activities at the training center and has no criminal convictions, his lawyers say. The AJC found two misdemeanor charges filed earlier this year against Tunick that are unrelated to the incident with Customs. His lawyer says they could be expunged after he completes a diversion program.
In a recent motion to suppress evidence related to the federal charge, Tunick’s attorneys argue the agents violated his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights by failing to give him Miranda warnings, and by disregarding his request to speak with his lawyer. Therefore, they argue, any evidence obtained from the airport encounter should be thrown out.
It will likely be months before a judge rules, after a hearing on the matter last month. The government has not yet filed a response.
During three years of construction leading up to the training center’s opening in spring 2025, the facility became a flashpoint in the nationwide movement to reform policing. Supporters of the facility say it is necessary to have world-class training that will help ensure good policing. Opponents worried about the facility’s environmental impact and feared it would lead to more militarized force.
Protesters and officers clashed repeatedly. One activist was fatally shot and an officer wounded during an exchange of gunfire at an encampment in the woods. Police motorcycles were torched, construction equipment was destroyed, protesters chained themselves to equipment, and police in riot gear used tear gas on demonstrators. There were also instances of protesters hurling Molotov cocktails at police.
In their motion to suppress, Tunick’s attorneys say the government depicts Defend the Atlanta Forest as a “violent extremist group,” but has failed to put forth any evidence that Tunick was involved in criminal activity in connection with the movement.
CBP officials did not answer specific questions about Tunick’s case, but said the agency searched the electronic devices of less than .01% of arriving international travelers in the 2025 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
Statistics on the agency’s website show the number has been growing in recent years.
“The CBP device search numbers have gone up every year across both Republican and Democratic administrations for the past nearly two decades,” said Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends digital privacy and free speech rights.
An unusual case
Aside from Tunick’s case, experts say they are unaware of any others nationally in which federal authorities charged someone with destruction of evidence for giving customs officers a code that deleted a phone’s contents.
“It’s the first I’ve heard of the government charging someone for the automatic deletion of files from a cellphone,” said Angelo Guisado, senior staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, based in New York City. “Though the government does charge people under this statute, it is usually for the destruction of physical and not digital evidence.”
The Fourth Amendment typically protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures of their property in the interior of the country, Guisado said. But customs officers can search people’s belongings without a warrant or probable cause at points of entry to the United States to look for evidence against people it considers dissidents.
“The commonplace everyday nature of international travel, combined with the incredibly sensitive and personalized information that your phone contains, are banging up against the government’s wide latitude to conduct warrantless searches in areas with diminished constitutional protections, like an airport,” Guisado said.
Tunick said he came to Atlanta from Chicago in 2022 to join many others who were protesting the police training center. He said he developed some strong friendships, and fell in love with the city.
“I went to rallies, I went to the forest,” Tunick said. “I participated along with thousands, if not tens of thousands, of other people across the country.”
He said he realized a few years ago he was on law enforcement’s radar when he recognized a mention of himself as an unnamed, “unindicted co-conspirator” in the massive racketeering indictment of dozens of training center opponents brought by Georgia’s attorney general, who labeled them “domestic terrorists.”
Even though he was not named in the 2023 indictment, Tunick said it mentions him as a person who received reimbursement from a group that supported protesters. Tunick said he spent the money on a tarp for an outdoor classroom in the South River Forest in DeKalb County, where the training center sits.
According to his lawyers, an email the government has entered into evidence shows that Homeland Security investigators contacted CBP officials on Jan. 24, 2025, the day Tunick was returning to Atlanta from a trip to the Dominican Republic.
The email informed them that Tunick was under investigation for “suspected terrorist activities,” and would be landing that day at Hartsfield-Jackson. The email asked agents to detain him, search his baggage, seize all of his electronics and collect passcodes.
When Tunick arrived, CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team questioned him, searched him and his belongings, and insisted he provide a passcode for his phone, according to the defense’s motion to suppress.
Despite Tunick’s request to speak with his lawyer and “not engage in further questioning,” the officers insisted they could search his phone to see if it contained child pornography, the filing says.
“Evidently, this was a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr. Tunick’s connections with the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement,” his attorneys wrote in the motion. When asked in the AJC interview if there was child pornography on his phone, Tunick said: “Categorically, no.”
The government alleges that after Tunick gave them a password for his cellphone, its screen went blank, flashed several times, and the phone appeared to restart, according to the motion to suppress.
Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick’s attorneys, said there was nothing specific on his client’s phone that he wanted to hide — he simply did not want the government accessing his personal information.
“I equate it to slamming the door in the police officer’s face at the front door of the house,” Dodge told the AJC. “No warrant, no permission, no question of any sort of criminal activity.
“I have the right to close the door and leave them on the front porch.”