The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has suspended the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from conducting airport searches on passengers. The temporary prohibition comes after an internal watchdog’s concerns around the DEA, racially profiling, and seizing travelers’ money unconnected to crime.
The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued the memorandum – a “management advisory.” Following the directive, DEA airport searches will only be authorized if “connected to an existing investigation or approved by the DEA Administrator based on exigent circumstances.”
The memorandum noted concern that a lack of training and policy within the DEA “creates substantial risk.” Those risks include improper airport searches, the violation of “innocent” travelers’ legal rights, wasting law enforcement resources, and jeopardizing “asset forfeiture and seizure activities.”
One of the issues raised by the OIG was a confidential source (CS) working for an airline that allegedly got paid by a DEA office to tip off passengers in “certain U.S. cities” who bought their airfare within 48 hours of traveling. The OIG believes the DEA could have used that information and details about travelers at the airport within three hours of their flight to determine who to stop for airport searches.
The DEA cold consent encounters are optional. However, the OIG says the DEA and DOJ should consider whether asking to search when a flyer is on a jetway for a soon-to-depart flight is manipulative. The memorandum questioned whether the practice “could be viewed as placing undue pressure on travelers to accede to such requests.”
What Else Is There To Know?
The informative review of the DEA’s behavior cited a previous 2017 investigation which found that most cash seizures “were initiated based on observations and immediate judgments of DEA [special agents and task force officers], without preexisting intelligence of a specific drug crime.”
The OIG says there have been concerns about racial profiling during federal law enforcement agency encounters with travelers for over two decades. In 2003, the DEA reportedly terminated its data on whether consensual searches with travelers “were being conducted in an unbiased manner.” A 2015 report found that DEA Task Force Groups (TFG) “had not collected information about each of the consent encounters they had conducted since 2003.”
Moreover, when TFGs did document an airport search, which they did when an arrest occurred or something was seized, “they did not systematically collect demographic information.”
The DEA has concurred with the recommendations outlined in the OIG’s memorandum.
