State law was supposed to prohibit the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) from confiscating every penny of Stephen Lara’s life savings when they pulled him over for a routine traffic stop in 2021. However, by outsourcing its dirty work to the federal government, that’s exactly what NHP was able to do. 

Last week, in a groundbreaking decision, Washoe County District Court Judge Connie Steinheimer ruled that such circumvention of state law by local or state agencies partnering with the federal government will no longer be tolerated in the Silver State. 

In February 2021, Lara was traveling to visit his daughters when NHP officers pulled him over just outside of Reno for “passing too close” to a tanker truck. When officers discovered he had nearly $90,000 of cash in his vehicle they detained him for more than an hour on the side of the road while they searched the rest of his car for supposed evidence of criminal wrongdoing. 

Despite finding no such evidence — and even admitting to themselves there was nothing particularly suspicious about Lara’s activities beyond an unusually large sum of currency — the officers decided to confiscate the money using a controversial legal tactic called “civil asset forfeiture.” It’s a tactic that has been widely condemned by civil rights organizations, as it allows law enforcement to seize property without filing any criminal charges against the property’s owners, and — in most cases — add the proceeds from that property directly to its budget. 

For the NHP, however, there was a problem. 

In 2015, lawmakers had made some minor reforms to the practice in an effort to strengthen the rights of those targeted by forfeiture. Along with new transparency requirements, the law made it more difficult for seizures to take place without clear evidence of suspected criminal activity — and because there was no such evidence in Lara’s case, taking the cash would have put the officers and the department on shaky legal ground. 

Undeterred, the department was convinced it had a clever workaround to state law: It would simply have the federal government spearhead the confiscation of Lara’s property under a process known as the “Equitable Sharing Program.” 

Because federal rules governing forfeiture are significantly less rigorous than state restrictions, the highway patrol assumed it could have agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seize the property on its behalf. Under the Equitable Sharing Program, the DEA would then return 80 percent of the confiscated money to the NHP as a sort of kickback for partnering in the “investigation.”  

In other words, officers figured they could blatantly ignore a state law designed to bolster property rights by merely partnering with a federal agency. And, had it not been for the Institute for Justice (IJ) deciding to take on Lara’s case, they probably would have gotten away with it.

In September 2021, under intense public backlash thanks to IJ’s lawsuit, the DEA agreed to return Lara’s money. However, the fight wasn’t over, as his ordeal demonstrated the lengths to which local and state authorities have gone to circumvent restrictions put in place by state lawmakers — and so, IJ continued with legal action against NHP. 

“This is a groundbreaking decision that closes the door on law enforcement agencies trying to evade their own state laws for profit …,” IJ attorney Ben Field said in a press release about last week’s ruling. “This ruling is a big step toward ending the abuse of civil forfeiture nationwide.”

And make no mistake, because the budgets of law enforcement agencies benefit directly from such forfeitures, there’s a massive public-sector “profit” incentive at play as governments collect millions of dollars in property as a result. In Nevada’s 2022-2023 fiscal year, more than $4.1 million worth of property was seized across the state, and the numbers are even more staggering on the national level. According to an IJ report, between 2000 and 2018, nearly $70 billion was collected by various government entities across the country. 

In 2020, it was uncovered that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized more than $2 billion in cash from airport travelers alone — and in two-thirds of those cases no criminal charges or arrests were even made. In the vast majority of cases documented by DHS, the only “suspicious” activity that led to the confiscation of people’s money was the simple fact that, like Lara, they were “caught” traveling with a large amount of cash. 

An investigation by an Atlanta news station, for example, uncovered that agents working Atlanta’s airport were trained to confiscate money from passengers carrying more than $5,000, regardless of whether or not there was any evidence of criminal activity. Ostensibly, carrying such large sums satisfied the government’s requirement that there be a “preponderance” of evidence suggesting potential illegal behavior — a legal threshold significantly lower than what would be required for a criminal conviction or even an arrest. 

However, it’s not merely individuals with bundles of hundreds tucked in their backpacks who are being targeted by the DEA, DHS or state law enforcement agencies. In 2017, Nevada Policy Research Institute (my former employer) released a report showing the vast majority of seizures by local agencies in Nevada occurred in minority and low-income communities — and according to IJ’s research, the average seizure is a mere $1,276 nationwide. 

Those are hardly trends that suggest the tactic is primarily targeting cartel kingpins or full-time money smugglers. 

Putting an end to such predatory confiscation schemes will require far more than a single ruling from some judge in Northern Nevada. In the meantime, however, it's good to see NHP will no longer be able to pad its budget by outsourcing its highway robbery attempts to the feds.

Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.