EVERYONE who has data in their phone that would bring police attention to another person is obligated to protect that data or to wipe it.

The rules are completely different if you have reason to believe information in your phone could expose others to arrest and prison. In today's US environment, a contact list of other activists who do candelight vigils is quite enough to trigger this concern.

Agreed. It was always aspirational - no disagreement there. But people visiting the US from abroad in the 1980s and 1990s would never have thought to themselves: "They might detain me for something that I wrote that disparages Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton, so I better hide that." You can add Ford and Carter to that list as well. Hell, even George W. Bush wouldn't have done that.

That just wasn't a concern.

That is a hard "NOPE".

Traveling with brown skin, I would rather drive a week long road trip than go near an airport.

If you cannot afford to protect the people you communicate with, you cannot afford to fly or travel internationally. For domestic travel, consider driving, Greyhound, Amtrak(at the moment), or anything else that never "inspects" electronics and rarely inspects baggage at all. Be alert to any changes, and cancel if you see the station infested with cops.

Yes, CPB and ICE have been known to board busses but I've never heard of them demanding everyone produce their phones for inspection. if THAT starts up, it's driving, biking, hiking, or (for some folks) hitching or hopping trains (yes, that is still done by experts). Or just staying within your local range.

I do not place myself in enemy hands voluntarily (this is why I do not use the airlines, travel internationally, or even enter bag search buildings) and I will never peacefully hand over a computer or a phone. I see this given my position as the obligation of any soldier not to hand over classified military equipment to any member of an enemy army.

If I had a phone in Enemy hands with remote wipe capability in the absence of Google Play and a Google Account, I would wipe it even if this meant a 100% chance of an indictment. Better to take one for the team than let other people get raided, same as when I risked my own life by burning a grand jury subpeona in front of the courthouse.

When I had a phone pass through enemy hands in 2017, it was returned to me, but I presumed it rigged to capture the encryption passphrase so they could decrypt a copied image of the filesystem. I refused to boot it, instead smashing it to bits and disposing of the pieces.

Good I have currently no plans to visit US: After reading through I decided to double check it talks about US, not China. But guess at Border Control the difference for non US residents might not be that different nowadays.

I would for both countries take a dedicated and prepared phone (other devices alike).

Take it to the airport and feed it to ICE. If you are lucky they will steal it and spend time in a futile effort to crack it. If you are REALLY lucky they won't notice that swollen battery, will try to charge it, and a battery fire in the "evidence room" will destroy more phones they are trying to crack.

It's just an old phone however unsafe, so this would be difficult to prosecute as phones with swollen batteries are not legally contraband.

I say this because cloud services can and do keep your data indefinitely (looking at you Google,) and there is no point giving them data they can read (especially sensitive stuff.)

https://amhistory.si.edu/starspangledbanner/the-lyrics.aspx

an besides prove it to a judge.