Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport seized more than $41,000 in cash from Anthonia Nwaorie, a registered nurse who was using the funds to open a medical clinic in Nigeria. But while “the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas did not bring a civil asset forfeiture case against her”—a process where the government seizes property or cash that they believe has been a part of criminal activity, and a process fraught with abuse—“or charge her with any crime,” the government is now refusing to return her funds unless she agrees to not sue them for stealing her money in the first place:
“It was like I was a criminal,” she said. “I felt so humiliated, so petrified, too. They were talking among themselves, saying how this is how people smuggle money out of the country. ‘This is how they do it.’”
More than six months later, Customs and Border Protection still has not given back her money.
Six months later, Nwaorie is suing. “This is just about as unconstitutional as it gets,” said Dan Alban, Nwaorie’s attorney and a civil asset forfeiture expert. “They’re requiring her to trade her right to the property in exchange for giving up these other rights: Does she want her right to the property? Or does she want to give up her right to the First Amendment? They’re sending these agreements out to not just to Anthonia but, we think, hundreds or thousands of people every year.”
Nwaorie, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Nigeria, has been traveling to her birth country for years now to set up “pop-up” medical clinics “in churches or community centers, where she provides basic care and over-the-counter medication such as ibuprofen and Tylenol for basic ailments. Trained as a midwife, she also examines all the pregnant women and lets them hear their babies’ heartbeats for the first time”:
But after a while Nwaorie said she wanted to go bigger. She wanted the patients to have regular access to care with full-time doctors at a small, permanent clinic. This year, she said her father helped secure her a parcel of land. Before she was stopped by CBP, she intended to get a permit from the local government in Nigeria and begin purchasing materials for construction.
“This was my dream, that people cannot be sent away from a clinic or a hospital because they do not have money,” she said. “This is something that I want to do for humanity, myself and my God, so there is nothing I would want to do to go against the law of this land to get it done. If I had known I had to declare the money before traveling, I would have done that.”
According to the Washington Post, “’there is no limit on the amount of money that can be taken out’ of the country, but if a traveler is carrying more than $10,000 in currency they must fill out a declaration, a rule she said she did not know existed.” Nwaorie had been saving the money for years, and even had some earmarked for relatives, which she packed alongside medical supplies and over-the-counter medications:
Nwaorie ultimately traveled to Nigeria the month after CBP seized her money, paying for her trip on a credit card and setting up another week-long pop-up clinic. And she had to tell some family members that she didn’t have the money set aside for them.
She explained to her brother what happened. “He was surprised,” Nwaorie said. “He said, ‘What? Does that happen in America?’”
As Daily Kos’ Kelly Macias wrote last year, civil asset forfeiture “disproportionately impacts black and brown people. It is a practice so heinous that even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas criticized it earlier this year.” And it’s a truly corrupt practice. In several instances “between 2012 and 2016 the Suffolk County, New York, district attorney’s office paid out $3.25 million in bonuses—from their civil asset forfeiture seizures,” according to Daily Kos’ Walter Einenkel.
“This case highlights the abusiveness of civil asset forfeitures in general,” Alban said. “It’s just crazy: She’s not been charged with a crime. The entire situation was so weak and not worth pursuing that the U.S. attorney decided not to even try to forfeit her money. She’s been deprived of that money. She’s been unable to open her clinic. She’s been living a nightmare. This has really disrupted her life.”