DEA agents in disguise are hanging out in airport terminals and going from gate to gate searching passengers as they prepare to board their flights.
In the Atlanta airport they’ve been found telling passengers it’s a ‘secondary screening’ to make them believe they’re required to submit, even though as a legal matter doing so is voluntary. Passengers don’t know they can just say no. But saying no may mean being detained. And when agents find cash, they keep it.
[T]he agents asked, “Are you high? Have you smoked? Do you have any drugs in this bag? Do you have any money?”
The search of Sturdivant’s bag turned up nothing, and he was allowed to board the flight. But Atlanta News First Investigates found several similar cases where officers with the DEA task force or Clayton County Police searched innocent people or seized money without making any arrests.
I’ve written about civil asset forfeiture at airports before, and even served as an expert witness in a case against the practice. The DEA frequently targets minorities so they’ve stopped tracking race. Police records though contain data showing 56% of jetbridge stops are of black passengers, while 68% are minorities.
Two comedians are suing over racial profiling on a jetbridge in Atlanta and there’s a nationwide class action over the abusive practice.
- The government seizes cash without charging anyone with a crime.
- Then the victim has to prove the money wasn’t used in a crime to get it back. There’s a byzantine process for doing this, and usually the victim has to enter into a partial settlement to get anything back at all, which includes a promise not to sue.
- And the way this is all structured, the agency seizing the money gets to keep part of it for themselves.
Even just flying Atlanta to Los Angeles is enough for a stop and seizure, because passengers are flying from ‘one known drug location’ to another. The government considers one way tickets suspicious, even though airline pricing practices have changed so that it often makes more sense to book one ways.
Local Atlanta news filmed plain clothes officers approaching passengers who were boarding planes, demanding to search their bags for drugs. They usually don’t find any. It’s the money they’re really after.
Here is more on civil asset forfeiture, from Last Week Tonight:
Ultimately it’s important to know that even though it is your right, it’s a good idea not to carry large amounts of cash with you at the airport. It’s subject to confiscation. And if you’re carrying more than $10,000 out of the United States, you need to register that with the government – not just with the country you’re carrying it into.
The percentage of Americans with passports has skyrocketed over the last 20 years. Despite the back and forth and shifts with isolationist tendencies and “America first”, international travel has grown a lot. Thus all those full planes and lounges even now when business travel is not back to being all that it was like before the pandemic hit.
This was an interesting afternoon. Come across the train from CPH into Sweden. No passport control but a uniformed customs person boarded and disappeared out of sight. From somewhere else out came some plain clothes customs people and they went pretty directly to a four seat area occupied by four passengers and then asked two guys some questions about from where they were coming and what were they doing where they came from.
They ask the Swedish/Gothenburg-area-accented guy — who said he was coming from London from or for work — to come along with them and bring his bag. He takes his bag and then they ask if he has any other bags. They ask his seat neighbor — a non-Scandinavian guy — who in response to their questions said he was coming from a weekend of partying in Denmark and then that guy is asked to go with his bags for a bag search. No one else nearby gets searched or really questioned. People around were wondering if they flagged the guys because of the ethnic appearance of one and presumed association of the other guy.
At the next stop, I find out they caught a substantial amount of marijuana. No dogs being involved was one of the partial tells that this was an intelligence led cross border operation to do the search and they had been provided images or specific descriptions of the suspect or suspects on the train. The same thing cannot be said of most of the cash searches CBP conducts at the gate area and jetbridges of international flights departing the US.
@GUWonder. And there’s the rub.
I’m sure *some* of these DEA case seizures are legit and based on good reasons. Ideally, we *could* trust government officials to use such powers judiciously and carefully. That’s why — silly me — I actually supported giving the FBI more surveillance power after 9/11.
The problem is that once you give governments — and the people in government — power, they will abuse it. So, sure, I supported increased surveillance power for the FBI thinking it would be used to track known terrorists. Then you find out they’re using it for political purposes to harass innocent people whose views they don’t like. We now have an FBI that goes after *parents* because they get upset about schools covering up politically inconvenient sexual assaults of their minor children. And more.
I was a naïve believer in government power for good. They’ve made me the libertarian I am today.
Some interesting points here about carrying cash. Leads me to wonder how much is enough cash to actually bring say on a 6-7 day domestic vacation?
@Dave – for what it is worth for domestic vacation I never take over a couple hundred cash (can always go to ATM if needed). Exception is when I go on a gambling trip. Yes I have casino credit in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and other places but that can be a hassle and sometimes delayed due to system down or revalidating bank info. Also, could go by a bank but that takes time and effort. Therefore, I usually travel with $5000-$10,000 (never over $10,000 so don’t have to file Federal notices).
For International trips I usually get $200-$300 in foreign currency (my bank does this and gives me a break on fees due to my status with them) and maybe $500 US just as a back up but try to put pretty much everything on cards.
Law Enforcement corruption is a symptom of government enablement and overreach, not a root cause. As long as we continue to enable, empower, and grow our government at our expense, things like this will be an issue. Simply banning civil asset forfeiture won’t solve the problem either, it will just find a new way to manifest itself. We have evidence this will happen all the way back to the Roman Empire, and probably further. Even if you trust the person you’re giving that power to, it’s guaranteed that someone will eventually come along who can’t be trusted. But once that power is given, taking it back basically requires siege warfare.
The U.S. government is totally corrupt. Those agents likely pocket the cash they take in most cases.
Thing1,
I have long been more than against the expansion of the powers given to the “security services”. Against them from before 9/11, after 9/11 and until today. Even as — or maybe because — my bread has long been well-buttered by being involved in the government game, I always have in mind that governments are not angels and there is too much of the go along to get along happening even when it’s in contravention of principles worth upholding — such as freedom from warrantless intrusions and fishing expeditions by government actors or even others.
@GUWonder. Yeah, I was young and naïve. What a dope!
Didn’t Churchill say (it may be apocryphal) something like “If you’re in your 20’s and not liberal you have no heart. If you’re in your 50s and not conservative you have no brain”?
That said, I’m in my 50’s and most align with libertarian.