“I do think this was unconstitutional, what the TSA did to me,” Brown said.
A Massachusetts woman who claims that airport security stole her father’s life savings has filed a lawsuit against the federal government.
According to USA Today, the prospective class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of plaintiff Rebecca Brown, her father, and a handful other people who claim to have lost money to either the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) or the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Together, they are asking the court to order the government to revise its policies for cash seizures.
“The fact that someone can put their hand into my pocket and just take it without cause was insulting, as an American,” Brown said in a video statement published by the Institute for Justice, an organization that describes itself as a nonprofit public-interest law firm.
“It is perfectly legal to travel with any amount of cash, either domestically or internationally,” Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Dan Alban told USA Today.
“We think there is no dispute of material facts that the TSA unlawfully and unconstitutionally stops and seizes travelers with cash at the airport, even though it admits it poses no threat to transportation security,” Alban said in a separate statement.
USA Today notes that Customs and Border Control regulations require travelers entering or leaving the United States to declare currency exceeding $10,000 in value, but they are entitled to carry even larger amounts. The TSA is typically permitted to inspect currency for traces of suspicious material, but the agency cannot seize cash without cause.
“They want to inspect it for that, no problem,” Alban said. “It’s when they do stuff after that to try to investigate whether the cash is somehow involved in criminal activity that they run afoul of the Fourth Amendment and exceed their authority.”
Brown claims that she had more than $80,000 in cash seized upon arriving to Pittsburgh International Airport in August 2019. She said that her father, August “Terry Rolin,” had given her his life savings to manage.
“Like anyone who had gone through the Great Depression, my grandparents were suspect of banks and would hide money that they had saved up in little niches in their home, and my dad picked up on that and would do the same for decades and decades after,” Brown said in the Institute for Justice video. “When we moved my father from his home into a one-bedroom apartment, he no longer had those nooks and crannies to squirrel away this cash.”
Brown said that she did not have an opportunity to deposit the money in a bank before taking her flight from Pittsburgh to Boston. In her lawsuit, Brown describes how TSA agents noticed the money during her initial security screening. She tried to explain why she was carrying such a large amount of cash, but was later told by arriving DEA agents that “because it was greater than $5,000 and was thus considered a ‘suspicious’ amount presumptively subject to seizure under DEA’s policy or practice of seizing cash without probable cause at U.S. airports for civil forfeiture.”
“I do think this was unconstitutional, what the TSA did to me,” Brown said.
Sources
Feds seized her dad’s life savings at the airport. Now she’s suing.
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