Get a burner. Browse some boring content with it: few business websites, maybe some sports scores, maybe snap some photos of landscapes and dogs on the camera roll.

Then you have a functional phone and piece of mind. Making the phone feel “lived in” probably isn’t all that important, but I think it’d be easier to explain than a factory stock pay as you go phone.

This won’t stop the cops from hacking into your phone with celebrite, but android has a feature called lockdown mode that will disable facial recognition, fingerprints, and voice ID until your phone is unlocked via PIN. I need to unlock my phone quickly throughout the day, so I use fingerprint - but I use lockdown if I get pulled over or am going through security, etc. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better (for me) than having to enter a long PIN every time I need to unlock my phone.

Once you enable it in settings, you can take your phone to the power off/restart menu and enable lockdown.

Using Tasker, you could probably disable quick unlock when outside of your house, etc.

I don’t have time to read this currently but I will try to later. In the meantime, does anyone know how they are coercing access to these devices? I’ve done a fair amount of international travel and no one has ever asked about any of my devices, much less attempted to gain access to them. It’s my understanding that if you refuse them there’s no legal reason they could refuse you entry.

Obviously, legality is of less concern to this administration but these people should have legal recourse, at least until the facade of civility is completely cast aside.