A mom was saving up money for her daughter’s 15th birthday, planning an unforgettable coming-of-age celebration. Imagine the mother’s surprise when federal agents raided her home and seized the $15,000 in cash she was planning to use to pay for the party.
Miladis Salgado is a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant who splits her time working at an airport duty-free store and Subway sandwich shop. It was heartbreaking to lose the funds: “That was money I’d saved for my daughter’s quinceanera,” she said.
The agents raided Salgado’s suburban West Kendall home in May 2015 because they were acting on a bogus tip from a confidential narcotics informant, according to court records. But the lead agent on the case would later admit the cash was clean, federal records show.
Still, it took almost two years and a legal battle for the government to give Salgado back her cash, and according to her court filings, federal authorities refused to pay her attorney’s fees, which means she’s still out $5,000.
Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to weigh in and decide if the government has a responsibility to repay Salgado for all her costs. The Supreme Court has yet to agree to hear the case, but the court has taken the step of asking the U.S. Solicitor General to prepare a response, which, according to Salgado’s attorney Justin Pearson, is a good sign that the court may hear Salgado out.
Salgado’s case highlights what experts say is a glaring legal loophole that allows the federal government to seize the property of innocent citizens at little cost or consequence to itself.
After the authorities took her money, Salgado was forced to cancel the party she says her and her daughter had spent years saving for.
“We took photos of her with the dress on, but we couldn’t afford to have the quinces,” she said. “I felt, in all honesty, very deceived, very sad.”
Among other valuables taken in the raid were some $55,000 in cash and some $132,000 in cashier’s checks that belonged to Salgado’s ex-husband, who ran a garment business. But her ex-husband was unable to pay for an attorney to represent him in his battle with the government, and ended up owing over $300,000 to a creditor, according to court records. He is not a party in the lawsuit.
Salgado hired an attorney on a contingent fee basis, meaning that the lawyer would only get paid if she got her money back.
And then she waited as her case wound through the federal court system.
“A long time had to pass,” she said.
And just as her petition to get her money back was about to be ruled on by a federal judge, the government turned around and cut her a check, her Supreme Court filing explains.
As the filing goes on to argue, government attorneys managed to skirt provisions in a federal law that mandates that people be made whole financially after their assets are returned because they forked over the seized cash before a judge could order to them to do so.
If the government had waited on the judge’s order to pay Salgado back the money, they would have been on the hook for her attorney’s fees.
Spokespersons for the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment on this story.
According to a 2015 study released by the Institute for Justice (which employs Pearson), 88 percent of federal forfeiture cases never make it in front of a judge, but are rather settled out of court.
And according to Salgado’s petition to the Supreme Court, most people settle for a fraction of what the government seized from them.
Before President Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs, explains Adrian Moore, vice president of policy at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, “civil asset forfeiture was a very rarely used, and an even more rarely abused, tool.”
But, according to him, the generations-long crackdown on narcotics consumption has created incentives for law enforcement to “feed their drug war by taking assets.”
Michael Makowsky, an associate professor of economics at Clemson University who studies the issue, notes that civil asset forfeiture “is a form of taxation that you never have to put in front of voters.”
His research has found that small, rural municipalities often rely on civil asset forfeiture and the targeted policing of black and Hispanic minorities to address budget shortfalls.
Salgado said she doesn’t want others to experience the ordeal she faced. “I want this experience that I had to suffer to count for something.” Salgado said.