In all likelihood they kept his phone and will retain possession until charges are dismissed. Get a burner phone and wipe it before going through security. I assume if they see your phone is “fresh” they’ll take it on suspicion anyway.

If you change phones regularly you can use an old phone. No need to buy a new one.

Would you want the phone back after it’s been in their hands? I wouldn’t trust them to leave it alone.

I mean yeah, might be a fun reverse-engineering project to look for any backdoors or other modifications to the device.

GOS has boot attestation. But yeah, if I would travel to the US (I will no longer do that) I would bring a sacrificial device.

There are exploits that may work on a different level than bootloader

True, Pixel hardware itself might be backdoored out of the factory. But you have to titrate professional paranoia down to functional levels.

Surely he was also using the built in backup feature, if he was he would have been able to grab another used Pixel, install GOS, then just recover from his backup (I haven’t tried the restore yet just because I’m lazy, fingers crossed it works).