A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on. U.S. Customs took it without charging him with a crime.
A 64-year-old Cleveland man is suing U.S. Customs and Border Protection after agents strip-searched him at an airport in October and took more than $58,000 in cash from him without charging him with any crime, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week in Ohio.
Customs agents seized the money through a process known as civil asset forfeiture, a law enforcement technique that allows authorities to take cash and property from people who are never convicted or even charged with a crime. The practice is widespread at the federal level. In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States. (...)
The searches turned up nothing — no drugs, no contraband, no evidence of any illegal activity, according to the lawsuit. But the agents took Kazazi's money. Even more alarming to Kazazi was that the receipt the agents handed to him did not list the dollar value of his cash.“I began to worry that they were trying to steal the money for themselves,” he said in his court declaration. (...)
The Kazazis have been caught up in a broader struggle over civil asset forfeiture. Defenders of the practice, such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions, say it is a valuable tool for fighting drug cartels and other criminal enterprises in cases in which a criminal conviction is difficult to obtain. But media outlets such as The Washington Post and civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have found that the process is ripe for abuse.
“The government can just take everything from you,” said Wesley Hottot, the Kazazi family's attorney. Hottot is with the Institute for Justice, a civil-liberties law firm working to overturn civil forfeiture. People wishing to challenge a civil forfeiture must essentially demonstrate their innocence in court, Hottot said, turning the dictum of “innocent until proven guilty” on its head.
“You have to affirmatively show you're not a criminal to get your own money back,” Hottot said. “You have to effectively prove a negative.”
Federal authorities haul in billions in cash and property from forfeiture every year, a tally that does not include additional billions seized in state and local forfeiture actions.
by Christopher Ingraham, WaPo | Read more:
Image: Kazazi family/WAPO.ST/Wonkblog
[ed. Do check out: Stop and Seize. The whole concept of civil asset forfeiture is a disgrace to American democracy.]
