A decade-long practice of warrantless airport searches by Drug Enforcement Administration agents faces an abrupt halt amid mounting concerns over constitutional rights violations.
According to Reason, the Justice Department issued a directive on November 12 ordering the DEA to suspend most passenger searches at airports and transit hubs following damaging findings from an independent investigation that revealed inadequate documentation and training practices.
The investigation, conducted by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG), uncovered that DEA task forces were operating with loose criteria to flag passengers for searches. One particularly concerning discovery showed that the agency had paid an airline employee tens of thousands of dollars from seized cash proceeds in exchange for passenger information.
The DEA's practice of conducting "consensual encounter" searches relied heavily on paid informants within transportation companies, including major airlines and Amtrak. These informants would flag travelers based on criteria such as last-minute ticket purchases, immediate return flights, or traveling without checked luggage.
Dan Alban, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, highlighted the problematic nature of these practices. His organization is currently pursuing a class action lawsuit against the DEA over these airport forfeiture practices. The lawsuit argues that the agency's policy of seizing currency exceeding $5,000 from travelers without probable cause violates Fourth Amendment rights.
The OIG memo revealed that these search practices created substantial risks of improper conduct, potentially violating innocent travelers' legal rights and wasting law enforcement resources on ineffective interdiction actions.
A 2016 USA Today investigation revealed the massive scale of the DEA's airport operations, with more than $209 million seized from at least 5,200 travelers across 15 major airports over a decade. Even more striking was a 2017 Justice Department report showing that out of $4 billion in cash seizures over ten years, $3.2 billion were never connected to criminal charges.
The OIG noted significant concerns about the agency's reliance on civil asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize cash and property suspected of being connected to criminal activity without requiring arrests or criminal charges. This practice has led to numerous controversial cases, including the seizure of a 79-year-old retired railroad engineer's life savings.
Dan Alban from the Institute for Justice stated:
[The memo] confirms what we've been saying for years, and it confirms the allegations in our ongoing class action lawsuit against DEA over precisely these sorts of abusive practices, where they target travelers based on innocuous information about their travel plans, and then interrogate them and search their bags in what they call a 'consensual encounter' that is really anything but consensual in the high security environment of an airport.
The Justice Department's directive specifically restricts consensual encounters at mass transportation facilities unless connected to existing investigations or approved by the DEA Administrator under exigent circumstances. However, legal experts note that this administrative action alone may not be sufficient for long-term reform.
Permanent legislative changes, similar to the 2019 bill that restricted the IRS from seizing small business bank accounts, may be necessary to prevent future abuses. Senators Ron Wyden and Cynthia Lummis have already urged the Justice Department to ban federal law enforcement agencies from obtaining Americans' travel information without proper legal authority.
The directive's implementation will significantly impact how the DEA conducts operations at transportation hubs, though TSA screeners may still flag cash at security checkpoints.
The Justice Department's directive marks a significant shift in DEA airport operations, halting a controversial program that targeted travelers based on suspicious travel patterns and resulted in millions of dollars in cash seizures. The suspension comes after the OIG investigation revealed serious training deficiencies and documentation failures that threatened constitutional rights. While the directive provides immediate relief from warrantless searches, experts suggest that only permanent legislative reform can prevent future violations of travelers' rights at transportation hubs.
