The Justice Department has ordered the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to suspend most searches of passengers at airports and other transit hubs after an independent investigation found that DEA task forces do not failed to document searches and were not properly trained, creating a significant risk of constitutional violations and prosecutions.

On November 12, the deputy attorney general ordered the DEA to end so-called “consensual encounter” searches at airports – unless they are part of an existing investigation into a criminal network – after taking knowledge of the bill from the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Justice. (OIG) that describes a decade of “significant concerns” about how the DEA uses paid airline informants and vague criteria to flag passengers for drugs and cash.

OIG investigators found that the DEA paid an airline employee tens of thousands of dollars over the past several years from money seized from his tips. However, the vast majority of these airport seizures are not accompanied by criminal prosecution. This has led to years of complaints from civil liberties groups that the DEA abuses civil asset forfeiture, a practice that allows police to seize cash and other property suspected of being linked to criminal activities such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never arrested. or accused of a crime.

THE notereleased today by the OIG, found that failure to properly train agents and conduct document searches “creates substantial risks that special agents (SAs) and task force agents ( TFO) of the DEA conduct these activities inappropriately; impose unjustified charges and violate the legal rights of innocent travelers; jeopardize the ministry’s confiscation and asset seizure activities; and wasting law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions. »

The OIG memo and directive are a victory for advocacy groups that oppose civil asset forfeiture, such as the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that is currently filing a lawsuit . a class action challenge the DEA’s airport confiscation practices.

Dan Alban, senior counsel at the Institute for Justice, says the OIG memo “confirms what we have been saying for years, and it confirms the allegations in our ongoing class action lawsuit against the DEA regarding precisely these kinds of abusive practices, where they target travelers based on innocuous information about their travel plans, then question them and search their luggage in what they call a “consensual encounter” that is actually anything but consensual in the high-security environment of an airport.

The OIG launched an investigation earlier this year following the Institute for Justice 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 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint and was boarding his flight when he was approached by a DEA officer who asked him to search his hand luggage. When David refused to give permission, the officer said he was holding the carry-on bag and David could either board his flight or consent to a search.

David completely missed his flight and eventually consented to a search of his carry-on baggage, which revealed no drugs or money.

The DEA agent told David he was suspected of illicit activity because he had booked his flight shortly before it took off. “When you buy a last minute ticket, we receive alerts,” explains the police officer. “We go out and talk to these people, which is what I tried to do to you, but you won’t let me do it.”

The OIG’s subsequent investigation revealed that David was one of five passengers flagged that day by an airline employee paid by the DEA to flag travelers’ itineraries if they met certain suspicious criteria.

According to past OIG audits, common red flags for passengers are “traveling to or from a known source city for drug trafficking, purchasing a ticket within 24 hours of travel, purchasing a ticket for a long flight with immediate return, buy a single ticket. road ticket and travel without checked baggage.

The OIG memo released today states that “it is not unusual for travelers, including business travelers and last-minute vacationers, to purchase tickets within 48 hours of a flight.”

This DEA practice of obtaining passenger information from transportation companies, such as Amtrak and major airlines, was the first revealed in 2014, with more information released in a 2016 inspector general audit.

By combining a network of snitches, flexible search criteria, and the low standard of proof for seizing property under civil asset forfeiture, DEA task forces were able to seize an enormous amount of money from airline passengers, although it is perfectly legal to fly domestically with large sums of cash.

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 Office of 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 flimsy suspicions and without evidence, continued.

The Institute for Justice launched its class-action lawsuit in 2020. The lawsuit argues that the DEA has a practice or policy of seizing travelers’ currency at U.S. airports without probable cause simply if the dollar amount is more than $5,000 . According to the suit, this practice violates travelers’ Fourth Amendment rights.

One of the lead plaintiffs in the suit, Terrence Rolin, a 79-year-old retired railroad engineer, had his savings of $82,373 seized by the DEA after his daughter attempted to take them on a flight departing from Pittsburgh with the intention of dropping them off. in a bank. After the case became public, the DEA returned the money.

The DEA seized $43,167 from Stacy Jones, another of the plaintiffs in the Institute for Justice lawsuit, in 2019 as she attempted to return home to Tampa, Florida, from Wilmington, North Carolina . Jones 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 he said was flying to Ohio to buy a tow truck when agents seized his savings at the airport.

In all of these cases, DEA agents initially decided that the cash was linked to drug trafficking.

Last year, Senators Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) and Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) exhorted the Justice Department to prohibit the DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies from using travel industry employees as sources to obtain information about Americans’ travel without a warrant or subpoena .

The Justice Department’s directive ends “all consensual encounters at public transportation facilities unless related to an existing investigation or approved by the DEA Administrator based on urgent circumstances.” .

Alban says the Justice Department’s directive will reduce the majority of improper “consensual encounter” searches, but it will not prevent TSA screeners from flagging cash at security checkpoints.

Furthermore, Alban asserts, only legislation can permanently prevent the DEA from abusing asset forfeiture, emphasizing a 2019 bill passed by Congress which prevented the IRS from summarily seizing small business bank accounts.

“This is the kind of reform that is really needed,” says Alban, “because at any time this directive could be repealed, and the DEA would then return to its usual practice of preying on travelers at airports.”

The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.