Two men were pulled over while driving on I-20 in Texas, carrying $250,000 worth of gold bars. US law permits and encourages law enforcement to confiscate assets. Civil asset forfeiture enables the government to simply seize assets and declare that the owner is guilty of money laundering before any due process occurs.
“We have to be able to prove what that criminal activity was, in other words how they got the money that they laundered. A lot of times that’s hard when your case starts with a traffic stop,” DA Tonda Curry said. Officers and drug sniffing dogs searched the men and their vehicle but found nothing aside from the gold. Curry initially attempted to pin the men with money laundering charges but could not make a case. The DA then determined that the men were involved in some criminal organization “that defrauds the elderly with investment-type scams.”
Since they were instantly charged with a crime, the law permitted the officers to confiscate the gold. “So he can’t give it back to them and let them go on down the road, it’s not theirs,” the DA explained, saying that charging the men with a civil case would be easier to prove than an actual criminal investigation.
“Even if I can’t say exactly what [crime] it was, why should they be able to profit off of it? Why should it not go back into fighting crime in our communities?” Curry said.
Civil asset forfeiture is blatant legal theft. The lawyers for the men received 24 oz of the stolen gold, and the county confiscated the rest that was worth an estimated $195,000.
“For a small county like ours, it’s a big, big relief for the taxpayers,” she said. “Even if I can’t say exactly what [crime] it was, why should they be able to profit off of it? Why should it not go back into to fighting crime in our communities?”
The entire premise of civil forfeiture is that the government can seize your assets without even charging you with a crime, let alone convicting you in a court of law. The government deploys law enforcement to act as their mob collectors, and again, no crime needs to be committed. This happens regularly, and the person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is immediately GUILTY until proven innocent. They have taken people off trains, planes, traffic stops– you name it–and accused them of criminal activity. If the government finds you with a tangible asset they want, they can take it from you, and it is then your responsibility and obligation to prove that you did not commit a crime.
The government has openly taken gold, cash, homes, cars, and even businesses in the name of money laundering, or in this case, an unnamed crime that they did not need to prove because the men happened to be Chinese nationals. So they stole a quarter-million from them and deported them back to China, then cheered that the funds would help the local government.
Law enforcement agencies no longer act as protectors of the public but as revenue collectors, seizing property from people who, in many cases, have done nothing wrong.
