DEA Ends Airport Gate Searches After Years of Documented Civil Asset Forfeiture Abuses

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is ending searches of passengers at airports and other transit hubs after years of investigations by government watchdogs, civil liberties groups and media outlets documenting how agents seized legal cash from innocent American travelers.

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram announced in a note Last week, the agency abandoned its Transportation Interdiction Program (TIP) and reassigned agents, citing an internal review that found the program was outdated and resulted in few arrests. The Department of Justice temporarily suspended program in November after an inspector general report highlighted the significant risk of constitutional violations and litigation created by so-called “consensual encounter” searches conducted by DEA agents at airports.

Milgram wrote in his memo that the results of the DEA’s internal review, which was launched following the inspector general’s report, showed “clearly that TIP is not an effective means of using our limited resources. According to the memo, between 2022 and 2024, DEA agents participating in TIP seized $22 million in suspected drug proceeds, but arrested only 57 suspects. Modern cartels are increasingly laundering their illicit proceeds through cryptocurrency rather than smuggling cash through airports, Milgram wrote. Meanwhile, Milgram said the DEA’s more sophisticated investigations into criminal networks during the same period yielded $1.4 billion and “thousands” of arrests.

However, Milgram’s memo barely mentions the most important reason she ended airport searches: abuse of the constitutional rights of American travelers.

The Institute for Justice (IJ), a public interest law firm, is currently litigating a class action alleging that the DEA and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are violating travelers’ Fourth Amendment rights by seizing their money without probable cause simply if the dollar amount is more than $5,000.

Dan Alban, senior counsel at the Institute for Justice, said in a press release that ending searches “will help protect the rights of travelers from the abuses many have suffered while traveling. TIP encouraged DEA agents to go after people who were traveling with cash, even if it is perfectly legal.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general began investigating TIP in 2024 following the IJ investigation. release a video taken by an airline passenger who was arrested and whose luggage was searched by the DEA at the airport.

The passenger, identified only as David C., had already passed a TSA checkpoint and was boarding his flight when he was approached by a DEA agent who asked him to search his carry-on bag.

“I don’t care about your consent,” the officer told David several times after he said he had not consented to a search. David’s travel plan was reported by an airline employee who was a paid DEA informant. The agent found nothing in David’s luggage and David missed his flight.

Additionally, the DEA agent never recorded the search, even though DEA ​​policy requires that all such “consensual encounters” be documented.

“Without the subject, the individual thinks he will immediately use his cell phone to record the event,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz said. said“In fact, we clearly would not have known about it because without this video there was no record of the incident.”

The Inspector General’s investigation found that the DEA failed to properly train its agents and conduct document searches, and its report concluded that these failures created “substantial risks that special agents (SAs) and DEA Task Force Officers (TFOs) conduct these activities inappropriately; impose unjustified burdens. and violate the legal rights of innocent travelers; jeopardize the Department’s forfeiture and asset seizure activities and waste law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions. »

Milgram’s memo also failed to acknowledge that problems with the DEA’s searches and seizures of “consensual encounters” at airports had been known for years.

This DEA practice of obtaining passengers’ travel itineraries from informants at private transportation companies, such as Amtrak and major airlines, was first created. revealed in 2014, with more information published in a 2016 Inspector General audit.

In 2016, a The United States today investigation revealed that the DEA seized more than $209 million from at least 5,200 travelers at 15 major airports over the previous decade.

A 2017 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general find that the DEA seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity over the previous decade, but that $3.2 billion of those seizures were never linked to criminal charges.

This 2017 report warned that the DEA’s airport forfeiture activities were undermining its credibility: “When administrative seizures and forfeitures ultimately do not advance an investigation or prosecution, law enforcement gives the impression, and risks the reality, that they are more interested in seizure and confiscation. in cash than to advance an investigation or prosecution.

But the DEA’s cash seizures, based on suspicion without evidence of drug trafficking, continued.

IJ launched its class-action lawsuit in 2020. One of the lead plaintiffs is Terrence Rolin, a 79-year-old retired railroad engineer who had his savings of $82,373 seized by the DEA after his daughter tried to take them in a flight. from Pittsburgh with the intention of depositing it in a bank. After the case became public, the DEA returned the money.

Another of the plaintiffs had $43,167 seized by the DEA while trying to return home to Tampa, Florida, from Wilmington, North Carolina. She said the money came from the sale of a used car, as well as money she and her husband intended to take to the casino. The DEA gave him back his money after she also contested the seizure.

Likewise, in 2021, the DEA income $28,000 to Kermit Warren, a New Orleans man who said he was flying to Ohio to buy a tow truck when agents seized his savings at the airport.

In all of these cases, DEA agents accused the passengers of being involved in drug trafficking, only to return the money after disputing the seizures. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize cash and property suspected of being related to illegal activity, even if the owner is not charged with a crime.

Although the DEA ended research into “consensual encounters,” Alban noted that the DEA could choose to revive TIP at any time and urged Congress to pass the FAIR Lawlegislation that would significantly reform federal civil asset forfeiture practices.

“We once again call on Congress to pass the FAIR Act to permanently reform federal civil forfeiture laws that encourage and enable this bad behavior,” Alban said. “FAIR would end the profit incentive, close the fair sharing gap, and ensure every owner wins their case in court by ending so-called administrative forfeitures.”

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