by Edward Hasbrouck, Activist Post:
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been working together for years to steal travelers’ money.
The DEA pays informers to finger people who might be flying with large amounts of cash, and gets the TSA to identify these people when they go through TSA checkpoints at airports, claims that they “consent” to be searched, and then finds any money they are carrying and seizes it through “civil forfeiture”.
The DEA carries out similar cash-seizure operations on Amtrak trains — mostly domestic trains that don’t cross the US border — in collaboration with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
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In the video, a DEA agent won’t take “I don’t consent to a search” for an answer. The agent follows an airline passenger onto their plane (without objection by airline staff), snatches the passenger’s carry-on bag, carries it off the plane, and refuses to return it. The agent claims the right to keep the passenger’s bag as long as it takes to get a warrant (although they don’t have that right, and don’t actually get a warrant).
This is not meaningful “consent”, and it’s not a valid legal basis for a search.
An ongoing class-action lawsuit by the Institute for Justice on behalf of air travelers who have been searched without probable cause on the pretextual claim of “consent” in order to find, seize, and “forfeit” their cash has shown just how common this pattern of illegal search and seizure is.
