new york passengers thought train hijacked

According to the DEA’s own statements, it doesn’t need anything more than that to effect an asset seizure. (After all, he’s some sort of drug dealer, right?) But to grant the DEA the benefit of the doubt for its refusal to believe Rivers’ mother’s statements is to cut the agents an absurd amount of slack for everything preceding that.īecause what did the DEA actually have here? A young guy and $16,000 in cash. And, sure, the DEA agents had no reason to believe anyone Rivers put them in touch with was a trustworthy source of information. Even having his story corroborated was useless. It had no reason to suspect Rivers of anything, but the money was apparently too much to pass up. Leaving aside the unsavory hint of racial profiling, there’s the fact that the DEA helped itself to cash simply because it was cash. River pleaded with the agents, explaining his situation and even putting his mother on the phone to verify the story. The agent found the cash - still in a bank envelope - and decided to seize it on suspicion that it may be tied to narcotics. When one of the agents got to Rivers, who was the only black person in his car, according to witnesses, the agent took the interrogation further, asking to search his bags. Rivers said the agents questioned passengers at random, asking for their destination and reason for travel. Agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration got on after him and began looking for people who might be trafficking drugs. Rivers changed trains at the Amtrak station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on April 15, with bags containing his clothes, other possessions and an envelope filled with the $16,000 in cash he had raised with the help of his family, the Albuquerque Journal reports. There were no drugs and nothing to enforce, but that didn’t stop the Drug Enforcement Agency from taking $16,000 from a passenger on a train headed to California.Īfter scraping together enough money to produce a music video in Hollywood, 22-year-old Joseph Rivers set out last month on a train trip from Michigan to Los Angeles, hoping it was the start of something big.

New york passengers thought train hijacked