By AC Young | January 20, 2020

An elderly Pennsylvania man and his daughter are now suing the federal government after the entire grandfather’s life savings, totaling $82,373, were seized at a Pittsburgh airport after abusive TSA and DEA agents deemed it to be ‘suspicious.’ The elderly man worked hard as a railroad engineer for his entire life, before some ditzy agent decided they had the right to seize it without due process.

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The massive federal government law enforcement bureaucracy could not be more out of touch, corrupt, vicious, and abusive, and it’s good to see an Average Joe finally decide to fight back and punch these people in the nose. Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Barack Obama, Andrew McCabe, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi all get off scot-free, meanwhile a retired working-class man gets treated like absolute dirt. At a certain point, it comes time to burn the whole corrupt D.C. rotting edifice down, figuratively speaking, of course.

Terrence Rolin, 79, and his daughter Rebecca Brown are the lead plaintiffs in a federal class action lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Institute for Justice which accuses the Drug Enforcement Administration and Transportation Security Administration of ‘treating American citizens like criminals’ by seizing large amounts of cash from airline passengers without evidence of an underlying crime.

Brown was visiting her father in Pittsburgh in August when he asked her to put his cash in a joint checking account.

She was flying back home to Boston to do that when TSA and DEA agents at Pittsburgh International Airport noticed the large sum of cash and began questioning her.

Brown said she had checked the TSA website beforehand to confirm that she could fly with that amount of money, and the site didn’t say that anything would prohibit her from doing so.

A DEA agent asked Brown to put her father on the phone so he could verify her story about where the cash came from, but Rolin, who is suffering mental decline, was unable to verify some of the details, she said.

‘He just handed me the phone and said: “Your stories don’t match. We’re seizing the cash,”‘ Brown recalled. [Daily  Mail]

Absolutely sickening and disgusting. Now this man cannot afford to fix his truck or pay for badly needed dental work. If there’s any justice in this world, this elderly man will come to a juicy settlement with Uncle Sam for treble damages, or more. I am sick of the common man in this country being treated like a criminal for just trying to survive and thrive. Federal agents are living high on the hog in Washington D.C., lording over us like El Chapo and his ganglords in Mexico, and common citizens typically have no recourse to challenge them.

The DEA notified Brown that it was seeking to permanently forfeit Rolin’s life savings – leaving the retired railroad engineer unable to pay for dental work or repairs to his truck, his primary means of transportation.

‘My father and his parents worked hard for this money, and the government shouldn’t be able to reach into his pocket and take it,’ Brown said a press release announcing the lawsuit.

‘We did nothing wrong and haven’t been charged with any crime, yet the DEA is trying to take my father’s life savings. His savings should be returned right away, and the government should stop taking money from Americans who are doing something completely legal.’ [Daily  Mail]

I hope that the organization bringing this lawsuit continues to be well-funded and fights more of these type of ‘civil forfeiture cases.’

The Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based public interest law firm, charges that Brown and Rolin’s predicament is not uncommon as the DEA has a history of abusing a practice called civil asset forfeiture, which allows authorities to seize cash and property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is not charged with a crime.

The lawsuit argues that the DEA’s apparent policy of seizing money from travelers without probable cause when it exceeds $5,000 violates their Fourth Amendment rights.

‘You don’t forfeit your constitutional rights when you try to board an airplane. It is time for TSA and federal law enforcement to stop seizing cash from travelers simply because the government considers certain amounts of cash “suspicious,”‘ Dan Alban, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, said in the press release.

‘We are trying to bring about institutional change and fix this terribly broken civil forfeiture system.’ [Daily  Mail]

You can donate to them here.

This piece originally appeared on WayneDupree.com and is used by permission.

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