During a White House meeting with law enforcement on Tuesday, Sheriff Harold Eavenson of Rockwall County, Texas, complained to President Trump that local lawmakers are trying to reform civil forfeiture laws. In many states, those laws currently allow law enforcement to seize cash and property from their owners and keep them to boost police budgets, even if the owners aren’t convicted or even charged with a crime. Even worse, the owner usually has to prove that the property wasn’t used in a crime, a reversal of the “innocent until proven guilty” standard that prevails in criminal courts.
“There is a state senator in Texas who was talking about introducing legislation to require a conviction before we could receive that forfeiture money,” Sheriff Eavenson said to Trump. “And I told him that the cartel would build a monument to him in Mexico if he could get that legislation passed.”
“Who is the state senator?” Trump asked. “Want to give his name?”
He then offered, apparently in jest: “We’ll destroy his career.”
Yes, it was a joke, and for obvious reasons that was what everyone focused on. But forfeiture is a serious issue on which people at all points of the political spectrum are coming to recognize that due process and the rule of law are under threat. And civil forfeiture reform is an issue where Trump’s soon-to-be-confirmed Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has been squarely at odds with conservatives for some time. States will need to resist federal pressure to keep this abusive practice going, just as they had to under President Obama, who was historically bad on this issue.
Some states — like Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Montana, Nebraska, Minnesota, Maryland and New Mexico — have recently passed civil forfeiture reforms. (Others, such as Michigan, have at least passed laws that require full transparency and reporting on forfeitures.) These states are already preventing the police from doing what it seems they obviously shouldn’t have been allowed to do in the first place: taking small cash and property from people who have been neither charged with nor convicted of any crime. It’s a surprisingly common practice, even though it sounds completely unconstitutional.
Where implemented properly, these reforms are also preventing or hindering local law enforcement from circumventing state law by participating in the federal Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing program.
There’s no reason to assume that President Trump is especially knowledgeable on this issue, or that he knew for sure what he was condoning. But this is an area where conservatives should be unsparing with their criticism if necessary. Civil asset forfeiture is not just some obscure issue. It’s the difference between living in a country where the cops can shake you down for whatever is in your pockets, or even take your house away for a crime you didn’t even commit, or living in a country where such injustices don’t and cannot happen.
Fortunately, as long as state senators, legislators and governors refuse to be cowed, these reforms are going to happen, with or without Trump. Federalism matters.
