A Texas nurse sued US Customs for seizing her money at the airport and then demanding that she waive rights to get it back

Anthonia Nwaorie was only a few metres from boarding a plane when customs agents stopped her and started asking questions.

How many people are you carrying money for? How long have you been in the United States? How many people are travelling with you?

“I said, ‘I’m travelling alone’,” she recalled. “Whatever money that I have is my money.” Nwaorie soon discovered that the reality was not so simple.

The 59-year-old nurse was travelling to Nigeria via Frankfurt, bringing medical supplies and $41,377 in cash – most of which she had saved up for years herself. She was planning to start a medical clinic for women and children in a village in Imo state, where she grew up before moving to the US in 1982 and becoming an American citizen 12 years later.

Nwaorie knew that travellers entering the US have to declare currency over $10,000. But she was completely unaware, she said, that the requirement also exists for anyone exiting the country.

On the basis that Nwaorie failed to declare the money on that October afternoon, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized it.

When the US attorney’s office declined to charge her with a crime or try to keep her savings by initiating civil forfeiture proceedings, CBP wrote to Anthonia in April. “It is our decision to remit the currency seizure in full” within 8-10 weeks, the letter said.

Just one thing: she needed to sign a “hold harmless agreement” in which she would agree never to pursue any kind of legal action against the government over the seizure, and to reimburse the US for “any necessary expenses, attorney’s fees, or costs incurred in the enforcement of any part of this agreement”.

Nwaorie did not sign.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anthonia Nwaorie at her week-long clinic in a church hall last year in a village in Imo state in Nigeria. Photograph: The Guardian

More than six months later , she still does not have her money back. And now she is the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit taking aim at CBP’s practice of demanding that people whose property was seized by the government have to waive rights in order to get it back.

Asset forfeiture has long attracted scrutiny in cases when local law enforcers seize and keep the property of people who in many instances are never charged with a crime, often using it in a questionable manner, such as one example in a Texas county where proceeds were used to pay for a margarita machine at a barbecue cook-off.

It is also a considerable source of revenue for the federal government and a practice backed by leading figures in the current administration.

“I love that programme,” the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said in a speech last year. “We had so much fun doing that, taking drug dealers’ money and passing it out to people trying to put drug dealers in jail. What’s wrong with that?”



In 1986 the Department of Justice’s asset forfeiture fund took in $93.7m, according to figures obtained by the Institute for Justice, a not-for-profit law firm that is fighting Nwaorie’s case. By 2014, the figure was $4.5bn, inspiring a memorable headline in a 2015 Washington Post article: “Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year.”

“Anthonia’s case really demonstrates how abusive civil forfeiture is,” said one of her lawyers, Anya Bidwell, “because she’s an outstanding individual, she’s a US citizen, she wants to do good in the world and if she’s not safe from civil forfeiture then nobody is safe from civil forfeiture.

“We want to make sure that it doesn’t happen to people ever again, that these kind of hold harmless agreements are declared unconstitutional,” she added. CBP declined to comment on the case, citing pending litigation.

Nwaorie said she tried to board her flight at Houston’s George Bush intercontinental airport at about 4.15pm, but was held until 10.30pm. “By the time it was finished I was having the worst migraine I’ve ever had in my life,” she said in an interview at her home in the Houston suburb of Katy. “Oh, God, they surely made me very angry.”

Bidwell said that more plaintiffs are likely to be added to the suit and hopes that through the discovery process the government, which has until 9 July to provide a response, will reveal more data about the sums and number of people affected by asset forfeiture at the border. Nwaorie eventually made it to Nigeria a few weeks later and operated a week-long free clinic, as she has in previous years. But, the lawsuit alleges, on her return she was singled out for additional luggage screening in which a CBP officer ruined her purse by slitting open the lining and she was told that because of the previous seizure, CBP will “follow her wherever she goes” when she travels abroad.

Still, Nwaorie intends to return to Imo this year and pursue her ambition of setting up a facility that could help thousands of people in need of basic medical care.

She hopes her ordeal will raise awareness and force the government to change its practices. “Nobody needs to be treated that way I was treated, nobody deserves that,” she said. “It’s unreal.”