Civil Asset Forfeiture Takes $5 Billion Per Year From People Never Charged With a Crime

In the American legal system, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unless you are a piece of currency, in which case you are presumed guilty until you — not the currency, but you, the human being who possessed it — prove otherwise. This is not a rhetorical provocation. It is the literal operational logic of civil asset forfeiture, the legal doctrine that allows law enforcement agencies at every level of American government to seize cash, vehicles, homes, and any other property based on nothing more than an officer’s suspicion that the property is connected to criminal activity. The owner need not be charged with a crime. The owner need not be arrested. The owner need not even be suspected of having done anything wrong. The property itself is the defendant, which is why the case names in civil forfeiture read like dispatches from a legal system designed by Franz Kafka: United States v. $35,651.11 in U.S. Currency. United States v. One 2004 Chevrolet Silverado. State of Texas v. One Gold Crucifix.

The scale of this system is staggering. The Institute for Justice, which has conducted the most comprehensive analysis of civil asset forfeiture in the United States, documented that the Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund and the Treasury Forfeiture Fund together took in more than $5 billion per year at their peak. To put that number in context: in 2014, the total value of property seized through civil asset forfeiture by the federal government exceeded the total value of property stolen in all burglaries reported to the FBI. The government took more from its citizens than criminals did. And the government did it legally.

How the System Works

The mechanics of civil asset forfeiture are designed with a precision that would be admirable if the purpose were not the legalized extraction of wealth from people who have not been convicted of anything. When a law enforcement officer seizes property under civil forfeiture, the action is filed as a civil proceeding against the property itself — not against the owner. Because the proceeding is civil rather than criminal, the constitutional protections that apply in criminal cases do not apply. There is no right to an attorney. There is no presumption of innocence. The burden of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” but “preponderance of the evidence” — and in practice, even that reduced standard is often not meaningfully applied, because the owner must initiate and fund the legal challenge to recover the property.

The owner must typically file a claim within a narrow window — often thirty to ninety days — post a bond, hire an attorney at their own expense, and prove that the property was not connected to criminal activity. For a person who has had their $800 in cash seized during a traffic stop, the cost of hiring an attorney to recover it exceeds the value of the property. This is not a bug in the system. It is the system. The median value of currency forfeitures in many jurisdictions is so low that the rational economic decision is to abandon the property, which is exactly what most people do. In Philadelphia, a study found that more than 50% of civil forfeitures involved amounts under $500, and the property was disproportionately seized from Black neighborhoods.

The Racial Geography of Seizure

Civil asset forfeiture does not operate on a racially neutral landscape. It operates on American roads, in American cities, through American police departments, and it inherits every racial disparity that characterizes American policing. The ACLU has documented through multiple investigations that Black and Hispanic drivers are stopped, searched, and subjected to forfeiture at rates dramatically disproportionate to their share of the driving population, and the disparity is not explained by differences in the rate of contraband recovery — which is to say, Black drivers are more likely to be searched and less likely to have anything illegal found.

The Washington Post conducted a landmark investigation in 2014, analyzing tens of thousands of cash seizures made by police on American highways. The investigation found a pattern so consistent it could be mapped: seizures clustered along interstate corridors in the South and Southwest, disproportionately targeting drivers of color, and generating revenue that was fed directly into the budgets of the departments that made the seizures. In one case, a department in a small Texas town generated more revenue from highway forfeitures than from any other source, and the seizures were overwhelmingly from Black and Hispanic drivers passing through.

The pattern is not subtle. A Black man driving on Interstate 40 through Tennessee with $10,000 in cash — money he has saved to buy a used car, or to pay for his mother’s medical bills, or to invest in his small business — is the ideal target for civil forfeiture. He is carrying cash, which is treated as inherently suspicious even though carrying cash is perfectly legal. He is Black, which in the calculus of pretextual traffic stops increases the probability that he will be stopped. And if the officer decides that the cash is “suspicious,” it is gone. Not temporarily. Not pending investigation. Gone, unless the driver can afford to hire an attorney, file a claim, post a bond, and wait months or years for a hearing in which the burden of proof falls on him to demonstrate that his own money is innocent.

“The poorest people, the most vulnerable people, the people who are least able to defend themselves, are the targets of this kind of predatory government behavior.”
— Justice Clarence Thomas, concurrence in Leonard v. Texas, 2017

When Clarence Thomas — the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court, a man not typically associated with critiques of law enforcement — writes that civil asset forfeiture has “led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses” and calls the practice constitutionally suspect, the bipartisan nature of the problem becomes impossible to deny. This is not a liberal issue or a conservative issue. It is a property rights issue that happens to fall disproportionately on people who are Black, who are poor, and who are both.

The Incentive Structure Is the Problem

The most corrosive feature of civil asset forfeiture is not the seizure itself but what happens to the money afterward. In most jurisdictions, the seizing agency keeps the proceeds. Federal law provides for “equitable sharing,” a program in which local and state law enforcement agencies partner with federal agencies on forfeiture cases and receive up to 80% of the proceeds. This arrangement creates a direct financial incentive for police departments to seize property, and it is not a theoretical incentive — it is a budgetary reality. Departments in jurisdictions across the country have become dependent on forfeiture revenue to fund operations, equipment, and personnel.

The consequence is policing-for-profit: law enforcement decisions driven not by public safety considerations but by revenue generation. When a department’s budget depends on the volume of property seized, the pressure to seize more property is institutional, not individual. It does not require corrupt officers or malicious intent. It requires only a system in which the financial interests of the institution are aligned with the deprivation of citizens’ property, and in which the citizens most likely to be targeted are those least able to mount a legal challenge. The system is not broken. It is operating exactly as designed, and the design is extraction.

The Human Cost in Black Communities

The aggregate data obscures individual devastation. A Black business owner in Detroit has $20,000 seized from his vehicle during a traffic stop — money he was taking to a supplier. He is not charged with any crime. He hires an attorney for $5,000, waits fourteen months for a hearing, and eventually recovers $15,000 of his original $20,000 after legal fees. He has lost $5,000 and fourteen months, his supplier relationship has been damaged, and his business has been weakened. None of this appears in any crime statistic. None of it is recorded as a harm inflicted by the state on a citizen. It is simply the cost of being Black and carrying cash in America.

A Black grandmother in Philadelphia has her home seized because her grandson was arrested for selling $40 worth of marijuana on her front porch. She was not involved in the sale. She did not know about it. She is seventy-two years old and has lived in the home for forty years. Under Philadelphia’s civil forfeiture program — which at its peak was seizing approximately 300 homes per year — her home is the defendant, and her grandson’s arrest is sufficient grounds for the city to take it. This is not a hypothetical. Philadelphia’s forfeiture program was the subject of a class-action lawsuit that ultimately forced reforms, but only after documenting that the city had been systematically seizing homes and small amounts of cash from residents who were overwhelmingly Black and low-income.

What Reform Looks Like

New Mexico abolished civil asset forfeiture entirely in 2015, requiring a criminal conviction before the government can permanently take property. The law passed with bipartisan support, signed by a Republican governor, and the predictions of law enforcement collapse have not materialized. Arrest rates have not declined. Drug seizures have not declined. What has declined is the government’s ability to take property from people who have not been convicted of a crime, which was the point.

Nebraska enacted similar reforms. Montana raised the standard of proof required for forfeiture. Several other states have implemented partial reforms — requiring conviction for certain categories of property, increasing the standard of proof, or redirecting forfeiture revenue to general funds rather than allowing seizing agencies to keep it. Each reform has been opposed by law enforcement lobbies, which have argued, with remarkable candor, that departments cannot afford to operate without forfeiture revenue — an argument that concedes the entire critique by admitting that the system is a revenue mechanism rather than a law enforcement tool.

The reforms that would end the abuse are straightforward and have been tested. First, require a criminal conviction before property can be permanently forfeited. This single change would eliminate the most egregious cases — the seizures from people who are never charged — while preserving the government’s ability to take property that is genuinely the proceeds of crime. Second, direct all forfeiture revenue to general funds or education budgets, removing the direct financial incentive for departments to seize property. Third, mandate independent legal representation for property owners whose assets are seized, since the current system effectively denies access to justice for anyone who cannot afford an attorney. Fourth, require racial impact reporting — disaggregated data on the race, income, and zip code of every person whose property is seized — so that the disparities are visible, measurable, and subject to public accountability.

The Constitutional Question Nobody Wants to Answer

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment extends this protection to state action. Civil asset forfeiture, in its current form, deprives people of property through a process that inverts the presumption of innocence, denies the right to counsel, and imposes the burden of proof on the property owner rather than on the government. It does so through the legal fiction that the proceeding is against the property rather than against the person, a distinction that is linguistically clever and constitutionally absurd.

The Supreme Court has acknowledged the constitutional problems with civil forfeiture but has declined to resolve them definitively. In Timbs v. Indiana (2019), the Court unanimously held that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, a ruling that limits the most extreme forfeitures but does not address the fundamental structure of the system. The Court has not ruled on whether civil forfeiture, as practiced, violates the Due Process Clause — a question that Justice Thomas has invited litigants to raise and that the Court has, so far, declined to take up.

Until the Court addresses that question, or until Congress acts, or until every state follows New Mexico’s lead, civil asset forfeiture will continue to operate as a system of legalized wealth extraction that falls disproportionately on Black Americans, that funds the agencies that conduct the extraction, and that provides no meaningful recourse to the people from whom property is taken. It is, in every functional sense, a tax on Blackness — levied at the roadside, collected without due process, and spent by the collectors. The Founders would have recognized it. They fought a revolution over less.