Drug Enforcement Administration agents will no longer be allowed to conduct random searches of travelers at airports and other transportation facilities after an investigation by a Justice Department watchdog raised concerns about the conduct of agency personnel.
The suspension, announced Thursday, follows an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general that found DEA personnel failed to properly document the searches. Moreover, they had not been trained on how to conduct them after the agency suspended its own training program in 2023.
The IG also noted that the documentation failures and lack of proper training were not new issues, but problems previously cited in a 2015 IG review that the DEA had said it would correct.
The random searches had been suspended since Nov. 12, when the Justice Department got a draft copy of the memo. The official memo, released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, described an incident earlier this year in which a person refused to consent to a search when approached by a DEA officer. The person remained with their bag, which DEA officials said was alerted by a drug-detection dog, and they allowed the officer to search it. Nothing illegal was found.
The person recorded the incident and made an edited version of the video public. The DEA didn't prepare any paperwork other than the consent form signed by the traveler until months later, when the video became public, the IG said.
A subsequent investigation by the inspector general determined that the traveler had been flagged by DEA officers based on information provided by a confidential source, an airline employee who provided intelligence to DEA agents about individuals who had booked their ticket to certain U.S. cities within 48 hours of their trips. In exchange, the employee received a percentage of any forfeited cash seized by the agents, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars over the past several years, the IG found.
"The DEA's failure to collect data for each consensual encounter, as required by its own policy, and its continued inability to provide us with any assessment of the success of these interdiction efforts once again raise questions about whether these transportation interdiction activities are an effective use of law enforcement resources -- and leaves the DEA once again unable to provide adequate answers to those questions," Horowitz wrote.
The inspector general also offered a series of recommendations focused on addressing the concerns raised in the report.