Justice Department Orders DEA to Halt Airport Searches Because of ‘Significant Issues’ With Cash Seizures
The Justice Department has ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to suspend most searches of passengers at airports and other mass transit hubs after an independent investigation found DEA task forces weren’t documenting searches and weren’t properly trained, creating a significant risk of constitutional violations and lawsuits.Â
The deputy attorney general directed the DEA on November 12 to halt what are known as “consensual encounter” searches at airports—unless they’re part of an existing investigation into a criminal network—after seeing the draft of a Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) memorandum that outlined a decade’s worth of “significant concerns” about how the DEA uses paid airline informants and loose criteria to flag passengers to search for drugs and cash.
OIG Investigators found that the DEA paid one airline employee tens of thousands of dollars over the past several years in proceeds from cash seized as a result of their tips. However, the vast majority of those airport seizures aren’t accompanied by criminal prosecutions. This has led to years of complaints from civil liberties groups that the DEA is abusing civil asset forfeiture—a practice that allows police to seize cash and other property suspected of being connected to criminal activity such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never arrested or charged with a crime.Â
The memo, released publicly today by the OIG, found that failures to properly train agents and document searches “​​creates substantial risks that DEA Special Agents (SA) and Task Force Officers (TFO) will conduct these activities improperly; impose unwarranted burdens on, and violate the legal rights of, innocent travelers; imperil the Department’s asset forfeiture and seizure activities; and waste law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions.”
The OIG memo and directive is a victory for advocacy groups that oppose civil asset forfeiture, such as the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that is currently litigating a class action lawsuit challenging the DEA’s airport forfeiture practices.
Dan Alban, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, says the OIG memo “confirms what we’ve been saying for years, and it confirms the allegations in our ongoing class action lawsuit against DEA over precisely these sorts of abusive practices, where they target travelers based on innocuous information about their travel plans, and then interrogate them and search their bags in what they call a ‘consensual encounter’ that is really anything but consensual in the high security environment of an airport.”
The OIG launched an investigation earlier this year following the Institute for Justice’s release of a video taken by an airline passenger who was detained and had his bags searched by the DEA at the airport. The passenger, identified only as David C., had already passed through a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint and was boarding his flight when he was approached by a DEA officer who demanded to search his carry-on. When David refused to give permission, the agent declared he was detaining the carry-on bag, and David could either board his flight or consent to a search.
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