The Justice Department has ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration to suspend its longstanding practice of searching passengers at airports — and seizing their cash — after the department’s internal watchdog raised concerns that it was fueling widespread civil rights violations and potential racial profiling.
In a management directive issued on Thursday, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said it had been hearing complaints about the searches for years — and had recently learned new information that suggested there were significant problems with them, including potential constitutional violations.
The IG found that the program “creates substantial risks that DEA Special Agents and Task Force Officers will conduct these activities improperly; impose unwarranted burdens on, and violate the legal rights of, innocent travelers.” It also found that the searches “waste law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions.”
In response, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco ordered that the searches be suspended pending an internal evaluation.
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The DEA concurred with most of the report’s recommendations but declined to comment.
The inspector general found that DEA agents and their local police partners have been stopping passengers at airports solely because they bought a last-minute ticket — and demanding, without a warrant, to search their bags.
The searches are supposed to be voluntary, but the report found that the timing of the operations created a de facto threat in that refusing to agree to a search could cause passengers to miss their flights. If the agents found cash, they seized it through civil forfeiture — a legal process that places the onus on the passenger to prove it was not connected to drugs in order to get it back.
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The IG said investigators could not come to any conclusions about whether the searches involved racial profiling because the DEA does not collect data on all the people it stops — only on the cases in which money is seized.
“The Department has long been concerned — and long received complaints — about potential racial profiling in connection with cold consent encounters in transportation setting,” the report said, adding that the DEA between 2000 and 2003 “collected consensual encounter data on every encounter in certain mass transportation facilities as part of a Department pilot project to examine the use of race in law enforcement operations.”
But neither the DEA nor the Justice Department “drew any conclusions from the data collected about whether the consensual encounters were being conducted in an unbiased manner, and in 2003 the DEA terminated its data collection efforts,” the report said, and “its consensual encounter activities continued.”
A search in Cincinnati
The IG report highlighted an incident documented in a video released four months ago by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties law firm which is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the DEA.
The passenger, who was in the Cincinnati airport and flying to New York, recorded himself telling a DEA agent that he did not consent to a search of his bags. The agent replied that his consent wasn’t required and used what the institute called “illegal bullying tactics.” The video has been viewed more than 2.6 million times.
“You don’t have to consent,” the agent was recorded saying. “When you buy a last-minute ticket, we get alerts. … We have a lot of money and drugs going out of every airport to New York.”
The passenger ultimately agreed to the search after missing his flight. Nothing illegal was found.
The IG found that the search was based on a tip by an airline employee who passed on the names of passengers who had purchased flights 48 hours before departure.
That employee was being paid by the DEA a percentage of the cash seized, the IG found, and had received tens of thousands of dollars over several years. That arrangement is problematic, investigators concluded.
Lawsuit alleges rights violations
In January 2020, the Institute for Justice filed a class action suit against the DEA and the Transportation Security Administration, alleging that the agencies routinely violate airport travelers’ constitutional rights by confiscating their money without probable cause.
In some cases, the DEA has seized money only to have judges order the government to return it. In 2021, NBC News reported that the DEA seized $30,000 in cash that an unemployed shoeshiner from New Orleans was carrying through the Columbus, Ohio, airport because his purchase of a truck had fallen through. Prosecutors later agreed to return the money after the Institute for Justice got involved.
In 2020, NBC Los Angeles reported that $82,000 was seized by the DEA from an elderly man and his daughter in Pittsburgh.
“The government took my dad’s life savings,” the daughter said. “It’s like I was mugged on the street.”
USA Today reported in 2016 that, over a decade, the DEA seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people at 15 busy airports.
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