DEA Admits Its Steal-From-Flyers Program Is Mostly Worthless, Shuts It Down Permanently

It’s amazing how many things just don’t look bad until, you know, you actually look at them. I mean, we’ve always known civil asset forfeiture programs are hot garbage, but the government at large was never really interested in this take. Some officials and legislators may have had their suspicions, but the easiest way for agencies like the DEA to prevent confirming these assumptions was to never bother seeing if these assumptions could be confirmed.

Asset forfeiture doesn’t dismantle drug cartels and seizing cash from random travelers doesn’t prevent drug trafficking. That much has been obvious for years. But the DEA liked taking cash, so that’s what it did. It put agents in airports to engage in warrantless searches of passengers and their luggage. It paid TSA agents to look for cash on its behalf. It accesses reams of passenger manifests for the sole purpose of finding people who might be carrying cash.

If the purpose was to stop the flow of cash across the United States (or out of the country), mission accomplished. But the DEA is in the Drug War. And what it’s been doing for years isn’t working.

The DOJ Inspector General released a report last December pointing out multiple flaws in the program — the biggest ones being the constant constitutional violations. The report was damning enough that the DOJ issued a memo that temporarily halted the DEA’s legalized theft program, known officially as the “Transportation Interdiction Program,” or “TIP.”

The DEA temporarily suspended this program ahead of the official release of the OIG report. That happened about three weeks before the report was published. Now, the program is officially dead, as CJ Ciaramella reports for Reason. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is ending searches of passengers at airports and other mass transit hubs after years of investigations by government watchdogs, civil liberties groups, and media outlets documenting how agents seized legal cash from innocent American travelers.

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram announced in a memo last week that the agency was scrapping its Transportation Interdiction Program (TIP) and reassigning agents, citing an internal review that found the program was outdated and resulted in few arrests.

Milgram is mostly known here for her hilarious fentanyl conspiracy theories as well as her bizarre take on fixing the DEA’s internal corruption. But she gets everything right here, even if this memo [PDF] may have been a team effort to which she only contributed her signature.

On top of all the rights violations, the continuous refusal of DEA agents to properly record and document “consensual” stops and searches, and the casually deployed bounty system that caused TSA agents to focus on cash, rather than contraband, there’s the very simple and ugly fact that robbing random travelers doesn’t result in Drug War wins.

After reviewing the data and the operating costs of TIP and comparing it to our traditional investigations, it became clear that the TIP is not an effective way to utilize our limited resources. For example, from 2022-2024, TIP seizures totaled approximately $22 million in drug proceeds and resulted in a total of 57 arrests. During the same timeframe, our predicated investigations focused on criminal networks, illicit financing, etc., seized more than $1.4 billion and arrested thousands of individuals.

Seems bad, even if the yardstick (dollars seized) is questionable. (For instance, just calling every dollar seized by TIP “drug proceeds” ignores the fact a not-insignificant portion of that $22 million was not actually “drug proceeds” but just cash DEA agents wanted to seize.) The lack of arrests is completely unsurprising, since the program was created almost solely for the purpose of diverting citizens’ cash to the DEA, untethered from the expenses and obligations of actually crafting criminal cases that might prove the allegations made by officers when they took money from unsuspecting passengers.

DEA agents can still hang around airports. But their main focus won’t be the bulging billfolds they see strolling past TSA checkpoints. And agents can still seize cash, but they’ll have to get explicit permission from a supervisor before even engaging in a “consensual encounters” with someone at an airport gate. It’s a net win for US citizens and their rights. And it’s another reminder that perverse incentives never produce the outcomes Americans wish to see produced by those they’ve entrusted with enforcing the law.