Civil forfeiture has existed in some form since the colonial era, although most of the current laws date to the War on Drugs’ heyday in the 1980s. Law-enforcement officials like Sessions defend modern civil forfeiture as a way to limit the resources of drug cartels and organized-crime groups. It’s also a lucrative tactic for law-enforcement agencies in an era of tight budgets: A Justice Department inspector general’s report in April found that federal forfeiture programs had taken in almost $28 billion over the past decade, and The Washington Post reported that civil-forfeiture seizures nationwide in 2015 surpassed the collective losses from all burglaries that same year.

In its report, the inspector general’s office also raised concerns about how federal agencies take funds, after it found almost half of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s seizures in a random sample weren’t tied to any broader law-enforcement purpose. “When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution, law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution,” the report concluded.

The practice has been under heavy scrutiny in recent years amid high-profile reports of abuses by law-enforcement officials and growing concerns about its constitutionality. In 2015, Sessions’s predecessor Eric Holder issued a set of modest policy changes that scaled back equitable-sharing proceeds if they were obtained without warrants or criminal charges. Sessions rescinded those policies, but, in a rare nod to critics, imposed some new safeguards on the practice by speeding up notification for owners and requiring more information about the local or state agency’s probable cause for seizing assets.

Those changes did little to dissuade his dissenters on Wednesday. Sessions’s move defied a broad, durable consensus against civil forfeiture on both the left and the right in recent years. Kanya Bennett, a legislative counsel for the ACLU, noted that some polls have shown 80 percent of Americans oppose the practice. “Civil-asset forfeiture is tantamount to policing for profit, generating millions of dollars annually that the agencies get to keep,” she said in a statement. “This is part of Sessions’s agenda to bring back the failed and racist War on Drugs, where this and other ineffective, unjust, and un-American practices were widely used.”

Libertarian and conservative groups also condemned the new Justice Department policy in strong terms. “The only safeguard to protect Americans from civil forfeiture is to eliminate its use altogether,” said Darpana Sheth, a senior attorney at the libertarian nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, in a statement. “The Department of Justice’s supposed safeguards amount to little more than window dressing of an otherwise outrageous abuse of power.”