Drug Enforcement Administration agents no longer will conduct random searches of travelers at airports after an investigation by a Justice Department watchdog raised concerns about the conduct of agency personnel. An investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general found DEA personnel failed to document the searches properly. Moreover, they had not been trained on how to conduct them properly after the agency suspended its own training program in 2023, reports the Washington Post. The IG noted that the documentation failures and lack of proper training were not new issues, but problems 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 DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, described an incident 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 identified by a drug-detection dog, and they allowed the officer to search it. Nothing illegal was found. The IG determined that the traveler had been flagged by DEA officers based on information from 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. 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.