JFK Airport Cash Seizure: What They Dont Want You to Know About Getting Your Money Back
Welcome to Spodek Law Group. Our mission here is to give you the brutal reality of airport cash seizures at JFK and across the country - not the sanitized version CBP presents, not the legal fiction that makes this sound reasonable, but the actual truth about what happens when federal agents decide your money looks suspicious. Because here is the thing nobody tells you until its too late: the government doesnt need to prove you did anything wrong to take your cash. They dont need to charge you with a crime. They dont even need to suspect YOU of anything. They sue the money itself.
This is civil asset forfeiture, and its been the governments most efficient revenue-generating operation at American airports for decades. Between 2000 and 2016, CBP and other DHS agencies conducted over 30,574 currency seizures at airports, taking more than $2 billion in total. Let that number settle in your mind. Two billion dollars. And heres what makes it worse - $500 million of that was seized from travelers who committed exactly one violation: they didnt fill out a form.
The cash was legal. The source was legitimate. The traveler broke no criminal law. But because they failed to declare currency over $10,000 on a FinCEN Form 105, the federal government took every single dollar. This is the system working exactly as designed - and if you're reading this after a JFK cash seizure, you need to understand how it works against you before you can fight back.
Your Money Is The Defendant (Not You)
Heres were civil forfeiture gets strange, and were most people's intuitions completly fail them. In criminal court, the government charges YOU with a crime. They have to prove your guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. You have constitutional protections. You have a presumption of innocence.
Civil asset forfeiture flips every single one of those protections upside down.
The government doesnt sue you. They sue your money. Literaly. The court case will be titled something like "United States v. $82,373 in United States Currency." Your cash is the defendant. And property - unlike people - has no constitutional rights. No presumption of innocence. No protection against unreasonable seizure that applies the same way.
What this means practicaly is that the burden of proof shifts to you. The government took your money. Now YOU have to prove it came from a legitimate source. You have to produce bank records, tax returns, business invoices, employment documentation, inheritance papers - whatever paper trail demonstrates that every dollar in that stack was legally earned. And you have to do this while the government holds your cash, potentialy for years, earning interest on money that belongs to you.
Think about that for a second. The system is architected so that the government benefits financialy from delay. The longer your case takes, the more interest they earn on your seized funds. Theres no incentive for them to move quickly. Every incentive points toward making this process as slow and exhausting as possible.
As Todd Spodek has explained to countless clients facing this exact situation, the moment you understand that youre not the defendant - your money is - you start to see why this system produces the outcomes it does. Innocent people lose their money all the time. In fact, according to investigative reports, roughly half of all forfeiture victims are never convicted of any crime whatsoever. They just couldnt navigate the system designed to beat them.
What Actualy Happens When They Find Your Cash
Let me walk you through the process because understanding the machinery helps you see were the traps are.
You're at JFK, maybe heading to visit family abroad, maybe returning from a business trip. Your bag goes through the X-ray machine. TSA sees a large stack of currency. Important note here: TSA cannot seize your cash. They dont have that authority. What they do is alert CBP or DEA, who then conduct what they call a "consensual encounter."
Heres were it gets ugly. A federal agent approaches you. They're friendly at first. They ask where your going, what the money is for. You think your just answering questions, being cooperative. You dont realize your under no obligation to answer anything. You dont realize you can walk away. You dont realize this is designed to build a case for seizure.
The more you explain, often the worse it gets. Heres a paradox that trips up innocent people constantly: detailed explanations of legitimate cash sources can actualy make you look MORE suspicious, not less. An agent trained to find drug money hears you say "I saved this over several years" and thinks "thats exactly what a money launderer would say." You cannot talk your way out of seizure at the checkpoint.
If they decide to seize - and at JFK they decide to seize regularly - here is what happens next. They take all the cash. They give you a receipt and a notice explaining the seizure. They explain that the money is now government property pending forfeiture proceedings. And they send you on your way - maybe to catch a flight, maybe to explain to your family why the $50,000 for your daughters wedding that you were hand-delivering is now sitting in a federal vault.
What happened to Jerry Johnson is instructive. He flew from Charlotte to Phoenix in August 2020 carrying $39,500 in cash to buy a truck at an auction. Completley legal. Documented purpose. An undercover officer approached him in baggage claim, asked if he had money or drugs. When Johnson revealed the cash, he was interrogated for an hour. Then he was given a choice: sign a forfeiture agreement voluntarily, or be arrested.
He signed. He has never been charged with any crime. His money was never returned.
This is how the system operates at airports across America. "Consent" obtained under threat of arrest. "Voluntary" forfeiture extracted through coercion.
The 30-Day Deadline That Destroys Cases
After your money is seized, the clock starts. And this is were the system claims most of its victims - not through legal argument, but through procedure designed to exhaust you.
Under 18 U.S.C. 983, the government has 60 days from seizure to send you a formal Notice of Seizure. They'll mail it to whatever address you provided. If you've moved, if the mail gets lost, if you dont check that address regularly - tough luck. The notice is legally deemed "received" whether you actualy see it or not.
Once that notice is sent, you have exactly 30 days to file a claim contesting the forfeiture.
Not 31 days. Not "about a month." Thirty days from the date of the notice. Miss that deadline by one day and you lose automaticly. The government keeps your money through what's called administrative forfeiture - no court hearing, no chance to argue, no review of the merits. They win by default because you missed a piece of mail.
This is not accidental. This is by design. The 30-day deadline exists specificaly because most people will miss it. Theyre traveling. Theyre dealing with the chaos of having their cash seized. Theyre not sitting at home waiting for legal notices. By the time they realize what happened, the deadline has passed.
And even if you DO file a claim in time, your not out of the woods. In many cases, you'll be required to post a cost bond - typicaly 10% of the seized amount. If CBP took $80,000, you need to post $8,000 just for the right to challenge the seizure. If you cant afford that bond, you may have to request a hardship waiver and hope it gets approved.
Then the government has 90 days to decide weather to file a civil forfeiture complaint in federal court. If they dont file in time, they're supposed to return the money. But thats 90 days of waiting while your cash sits in a government account. And if they DO file, you're now in federal litigation - which can take months to years to resolve, all while the government holds your money and earns interest on it.
The Case That Shows How Bad It Can Get
Terrence Rolin is 79 years old. He worked his entire adult life as a railroad engineer, saved diligently, and accumulated $82,373 in cash - his life savings. In 2021, his daughter Rebecca tried to help him by taking the cash on a flight out of Pittsburgh to deposit it in a bank closer to where she lived. She was going to set up an account for him.
DEA agents at the airport stopped her. They seized every dollar.
Notice what didnt happen: nobody was charged with a crime. The money was completely legitimate - decades of savings from a railroad pension. There was no drug connection, no fraud, no criminal activity of any kind. The DEA took an old mans life savings because his daughter was flying with it.
The only reason Terrence Rolin ever saw his money again was because the case went public through the Institute for Justice. Media coverage forced the DEA's hand. Without that attention, without the embarassment of seizing a retired railroad workers life savings, the government would have kept it.
Most people dont get media coverage. Most people dont get their story told on the news. Most people just lose.
And thats the uncomfortable truth about this system: it preys on people who cant fight back. People who dont know their rights. People who cant afford attorneys. People who miss deadlines because theyre dealing with the chaos of having their money taken. The Terrence Rolins of the world - elderly, trusting, following the rules - are exactly who gets hurt.
Why The DEA Just Ended Their Airport Program
Heres were the story takes a turn that proves everything Ive been telling you.
In January 2025 - just weeks ago - DEA Administrator Anne Milgram announced that the agency was scrapping its Transportation Interdiction Program. This was the program that allowed DEA agents to conduct those "consensual encounters" at airport gates. The program that let agents approach travelers, ask questions, and seize cash based on suspicion.
Why did they end it? An internal Justice Department review found that the program created "significant risk of constitutional violations." The Inspector General documented years of abuses. Agents taking cash from innocent people. "Consent" obtained through coercion. Seizures that never resulted in criminal charges.
The DEA's own leadership concluded that a program that had operated for decades was outdated and resulted in few actual arrests. They didnt end it because they wanted to. They ended it because the constitutional problems had become impossible to ignore.
But heres the cruel irony: the money they seized under that program? They kept it. The billions of dollars taken from travelers over the years through constitutionally questionable practices remain in government coffers. The policy changed, but the seized funds didnt come back.
This is what happens when an agency has a financial incentive to seize assets. According to CBP's own statistics, the agency seized an average of $152,418 every single day in fiscal year 2024. Thats not drug money intercepted from cartels. Thats regular travelers, many of them innocent, many of them facing the same bureaucratic nightmare youre facing now.
What Happens To Your Money While You Wait
Heres something almost nobody talks about: while your fighting to get your money back, what is the government doing with it?
The seized funds sit in federal accounts. The government earns interest on those accounts. Your money makes money - for them. And the timeline for resolution can stretch from months to years depending on weather you filed claims properly, weather the government decides to pursue judicial forfeiture, and how backlogged the courts are.
During this entire period, you have no access to funds that may have been intended for your childs education, your medical expenses, your business operations, your retirement. The government holds it, uses it, and has no particular urgency to resolve the matter. Every delay benefits them financialy.
This is why the system feels designed to exhaust people. Becuase in a very real sense, it is. The longer you fight, the longer they keep your money. The more complicated they make the process, the more likely you are to give up. And if you give up, they win automaticaly.
Some people calculate that the cost of fighting exceeds the value of whats been seized. If CBP took $15,000 and an attorney wants $10,000 to fight it, the math gets complicated. This is especialy true when you factor in the emotional cost, the time spent gathering documentation, the uncertainty of outcome. The government knows this calculus. They count on it.
But what they also know is that people who DO fight back, with proper representation and complete documentation, have a real chance of winning. The question becomes whether you can afford - financialy and emotionally - to make them work for it.
Fighting Back: What It Actualy Takes
If your cash was seized at JFK, heres the reality of what comes next - no sugar coating.
First, the deadline. If you recieved a Notice of Seizure, count 30 days from that date. If you havent filed a claim yet and youre inside that window, do it today. Not tomorrow. Today. The claim needs to be a sworn statement under penalty of perjury asserting your ownership of the cash and your intent to contest forfeiture. Get it to the seizing agency before that deadline passes.
Second, gather your documentation. You need to prove the money was legitimatley earned. Bank statements showing savings. Tax returns showing income. Business records if youre self-employed. Pay stubs if youre an employee. Inheritance documentation if applicable. Gift letters if the cash was a gift. Every dollar needs a paper trail, and you need to assemble that trail while the government holds your money.
Third, understand what your fighting against. The government only needs to prove by a "preponderance of the evidence" - meaning more likely than not - that your cash was connected to illegal activity. You need to prove it wasnt. In practice, this often means proving a negative, which is as difficult as it sounds.
But people do win. Brian Moore fought the DEA after they seized $8,500 from him at Atlanta's airport while he was waiting at his gate. He challenged the seizure, went through the process, and in 2021 he won. Every dollar returned. In January 2025, attorney Leslie Sammis took a forfeiture case to trial in federal court - the DEA had seized $41,805 and about $30,000 in gold jewelry. The jury checked "No" on all nine questions about whether the property was connected to crime. Complete victory.
These cases prove it can be done. But they also show what it takes: legal representation, documented evidence, and willingness to fight a system designed to make you give up.
At Spodek Law Group, we've helped clients recover seized funds from JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, and airports across the country. The consultation is straightforward - we look at what was seized, when it happened, what deadlines apply, and what documentation exists. Many forfeiture attorneys work on contingency, meaning they only get paid if you get money back, which aligns our interests with yours.
The system is built to beat you through exhaustion, confusion, and procedural traps. But the system can be beaten. The question is whether you have the right representation and whether you act fast enough.
That window is closing. The 30-day deadline doesnt wait. The government is already counting interest on your money.
Call 212-300-5196 and find out what your options actualy are before its too late to exercise them.
