DEA AGENTS Vs THE US CONSTITUTION!
September 17, 2019
If you are a true Conservative or Populist or Liberal this should HORRIFY YOU! These are modern day Highway robbers who can keep your cash- if they just think it's from drugs. The Amtrak secretary had amassed $854,460 from the DEA for his work snitching on riders.
FEW HOURS characteristically behind schedule, Amtrak’s Southwest Chief rolls into Albuquerque, New Mexico.Two plainclothes agents come aboard the train on a rainy day in March 2019.
One agent walks to the back of the aisle in the first coach car and waits, quietly observing. The other is tasked with getting people to talk and open their bags. His name is Jarrell, or Jay, Perry, and he’s done it hundreds of times before.
More problematically, Perry has been captured on surveillance footage boarding empty Greyhound buses and pulling bags out of the checked luggage bin. One clip captures him pressing on a bag so aggressively that he appears to be tackling it. But he stops short of opening the bag, which would be blatantly unconstitutional. Several people that Perry has seized cash from insist that they are not drug couriers and, in fact, were never criminally charged as such, though that didn’t help them get their money back.
Perry is not the only cop riding the rails. His tactics offer a case study in how law enforcement targets mass transit in the war on drugs, generating thousands of busts and a steady stream of revenue from seized assets.
In 2006, an Armenian couple described officers growing belligerent during a trip on the Southwest Chief the previous year when the couple was hesitant to agree to a bag search at Albuquerque. The couple said that the agents then pulled out Diana Arutinova’s bras and underwear from her bag, while making jokes, and threw clothing and shoes from her luggage onto the floor. Edgar Manukian demanded the officers’ names.
“You want my name? What are you gonna do about it, asshole?” Perry allegedly responded. Arutinova stepped between the men and said Perry then grabbed her by the arm and shook her so hard that her head struck the wall several times, not letting go until she screamed. Her arm was bruised from where he grabbed her, she later claimed in federal court. The ACLU of New Mexico that year helped the couple file a lawsuit against the United States government, Perry, and two other cops. (The ACLU of New Mexico’s Simonson says they later reached an out-of court settlement with the DEA.)