I am writing this post on behalf of a friend, whom we’ll call Alice. Alice has a heightened risk profile due to activism. Alice had a flight out of a US airport. When she arrived, there were ICE/DHS agents stationed at every entrance and exit. Their attitude was generally hostile. Alice made sure h…

The obvious lesson here which I’m hoping you’re already gathered by now is: always keep your devices and apps updated! And harden your OS as much as possible with the OS tools available to you. Going forward though, I would not use this device and have your friend buy a new one and set that one up …

Do you know what model iPhone it was? Also it’s possible they just guessed the password if it was really bad. Any iPhone before the iPhone 12 is vulnerable to brute force attacks against the secure element at least according to the most recent leaks I’ve seen, unless there’s a new exploit since then…

Alice has landed and has reported being safe. Waiting on this information.

This story isn’t adding up. Either the phone wasn’t fully off. Or her passcode was retrieved in other ways (bfu extraction leaked a app pin, surveillance, device infected prior to arrival, etc.) You say the phone was passed around, was it ever connected to a device? If they possessed some magic c…

Thanks for the link to the guide. I will make sure to forward that to Alice. Calling my friend dumb is not helpful, though. You didn’t hurt either of our feelings – we have thicker skin than that. However, people do come here for resources and support. This kind of attitude towards anyone with les…

I agree. I have shared links with Alice for resources that may be able to look into this. Thanks for your response. Nice guide by the way.

I dont know Alice son I can’t expect how knowledgeable she is. Probably she was targeted by cameras with face recognition stuff and that was why her phone was targeted as she is an Activist. But humans makes mistakes she could taken out the password when turning off the fingerprint option. Did she…

ICE took a powered off phone and it was returned powered on and unlocked

Questions

Shampoo March 28, 2026, 2:02am 5

iOS 17.6.1 is nearly two years old. I hope you meant 18.7.1 and your friend wasn’t dumb enough to ignore updates for that long. Either way any version of iOS other than 26 is no longer receiving updates for iPhone 15. Tell her to get rid of that phone, buy a new one, and follow this guide. If she can’t afford a new one, factory reset it and follow this guide.

Topic		Replies	Views
iPhone FaceID concerns Questions software	21	886	April 10, 2026
Phone at border Off Topic	16	1619	July 31, 2024
ICE agents snatch phone of student activist to ensure device remains in an AFU (After First Unlock) state General	18	1154	March 27, 2025
Protecting Phone Data from Border Agents Questions	43	5406	June 27, 2025
Apple's Lockdown Mode Blocked the FBI? \| This Week in Privacy #39 (Feb 6, 2026) Livestreams	0	703	February 5, 2026

ICE took a powered off phone and it was returned powered on and unlocked

Related topics