The Justice Department has ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to end the practice of searching passengers and seizing their cash at airports, raising concerns that the department’s internal watchdog is fueling widespread civil rights violations and potential racial profiling.
a management directive In a release Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General said it has heard complaints about the searches for years and recently learned of new information indicating significant problems with them, including potential constitutional violations.
The IG found that the program “creates significant risks for DEA Special Agents and Task Force Officers to improperly perform these activities; imposes unreasonable burdens on innocent travelers and violates their legal rights.” It also found that the searches “waste law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions.”
In response, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco ordered the search suspended pending an internal evaluation.
The DEA agreed with most of the report’s recommendations but declined to comment.
The inspector general found that DEA agents and their local police partners stopped passengers at airports solely because they bought last-minute tickets and demanded to search their bags without a warrant.
Searches are supposed to be voluntary, but the report found that the timing of the operations created a de facto threat that refusal to consent to a search could cause passengers to miss their flights. If agents found cash, they seized it through civil forfeiture — a legal process that puts the onus on the passenger to prove it wasn’t related to drugs in order to get it back.
The IG said investigators could not conclude whether the searches were related to racial profiling because the DEA does not collect information on all the people it stops — only in cases where money is seized.
“The Department has long been concerned about and has long received complaints about potential racial profiling related to cold consent encounters in transportation,” he said, adding that between 2000 and 2003, the DEA “collected consent-based encounter data on every encounter in certain cases . mass vehicles as part of the Department’s pilot project to examine the use of race in law enforcement operations.
However, neither the DEA nor the Department of Justice “made any conclusions from the information collected about whether consensual encounters were conducted in an impartial manner, and in 2003 the DEA ceased its data collection efforts” and “consensual encounter” activities continued.
Search in Cincinnati
An incident documented in the IG report is highlighted video It was released four months ago by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties law firm that filed a class-action lawsuit against the DEA.
A passenger at the Cincinnati airport flying to New York stated that he told a DEA agent that he did not consent to a search of his bags. The agent responded that her consent was not required and was using what the institute called “illegal bullying tactics.” The video has been viewed more than 2.6 million times.
“Consent is not necessary,” the agent was quoted as saying. “When you buy a last minute ticket, we get a warning. … We have a lot of money and drugs going to New York from every airport.”
After missing the passenger’s flight, he finally agreed to the search. Nothing illegal was found.
The IG found that the search was based on a tip from an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had booked flights 48 hours before departure.
That employee was paid a percentage of money seized by the DEA, the IG found, and received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. This arrangement is problematic, the investigators concluded.
The lawsuit alleges infringement of rights
In January 2020, the Institute for Justice filed a class-action lawsuit against the DEA and the Transportation Security Administration, alleging that the agencies routinely violated the constitutional rights of airport travelers by confiscating their money without probable cause.
In some cases, the DEA has seized money only to have judges order it back to the government. in 2021 This was reported by NBC News The DEA seized $30,000 in cash that an unemployed shoemaker from New Orleans was carrying at the Columbus, Ohio airport after a failed truck purchase. Later, after the Institute of Justice intervened, prosecutors agreed to return the money.
NBC Los Angeles in 2020 informed The DEA seized $82,000 from an elderly man and his daughter in Pittsburgh.
“The government took my father’s life savings,” his daughter said. “Like I was mugged on the street.”
USA Today informed In 2016, over a decade, the DEA seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people at 15 busy airports.