United States v. Ramsey

In United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616, 97 S. Ct. 1972, 1978, 52 L. Ed. 2d 617, 626 (1977), the Supreme Court said that "searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border." As the Court pointed out, the first customs statute, which granted customs officials broad authority to enter and search ships or vessels in which they "have reason to suspect" goods subject to duty were concealed, was passed two months before and by the same Congress that proposed the Bill of Rights including the Fourth Amendment. In Ramsey, the Court held: Border searches, then, from before the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, have been considered to be reasonable by the single fact that the person or item in question had entered into our country from outside. There has never been any additional requirement that the reasonableness of a border search depended on the existence of probable cause. This longstanding recognition that searches at our borders without probable cause and without a warrant are nonetheless 'reasonable' has a history as old as the Fourth Amendment itself. 431 U.S. at 619, 97 S. Ct. at 1980, 52 L. Ed. 2d at 628.