Last week, the US Department of Justice announced that it has suspended Operation Jetway – a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) program of stopping, searching, and seizing cash from passengers in airports without specific suspicion of criminal activity, and training federal, state, and local law enforcement to do the same.

The Policing Project applauds this important policy change, which comes months after we called on DOJ and the DEA to end Operation Jetway, citing the long-documented history of racial profiling associated with it.

Earlier this year, after investigative reporting revealed that at least two of the Clayton County police officers who stopped our clients in our lawsuit Andre v. Clayton County had been trained by the DEA through Operation Jetway, we sent a letter to DOJ and the DEA calling for an end to the program. In our letter, we outlined a number of specific concerns including racial profiling, the inherently coercive nature of these stops, and the DEA’s troubling practice of using civil asset forfeiture in connection with these encounters. In addition to our advocacy letter, we have also been seeking additional information on Operation Jetway through Freedom of Information Act requests.

In its announcement, the DOJ Inspector General echoed many of our concerns, finding systemic abuses in the DEA’s airport tactics and noting that the DEA itself found that its own training program “included techniques that are contrary to DOJ’s racial profiling guidance and, if applied, could open [the] DEA to accusations of targeting individuals based solely on protected characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or disability.”

Read our letter to the DEA and DOJ here.