It's of course absurd that the law was ambiguous enough in the first place that a warrant wasn't obviously required and it took the Supreme Court to resolve thi

It's of course absurd that the law was ambiguous enough in the first place that a warrant wasn't obviously required and it took the Supreme Court to resolve this. But the search in this case happened in 2019. How was the agent supposed to know what the Supreme Court would decide 4 years later after many appeals? The agents were acting reasonably enough, according to the law, that it took the Supreme Court to resolve it. This isn't a clear case of an agent not doing their job as it was defined. For example, we're also not going to retroactively fire all the other agents that also conducted searches like this even earlier. (We're not even going to overturn rulings of people convicted on evidence from warrantless border phone searches, since these Supreme Court rulings aren't retroactive. That's the worst thing about this in my mind). But after this ruling we can now definitively say that agents conducting warrantless border phone searches are not doing their job and should be fired. The evidence would now be thrown out in court anyway.