PHILADELPHIA (CN) – Just as racketeering and tax laws have put mobsters away for decades, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the government will use the same tools to take down the drug cartel MS-13.
Delivering remarks Monday morning to the International Association of Chiefs of Police at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Sessions formally designated the gang as a priority for the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces.
“These task forces bring together a broad coalition of our federal prosecutors, DEA, FBI, ATF, ICE, HSI, the IRS, the Department of Labor Inspector General, the Postal Service Inspectors, the Secret Service, the Marshals Service, and the Coast Guard,” Sessions told the crowd. “And they all have one mission, to go after drug criminals and traffickers at the highest levels.”
Sessions mentioned civil-asset forfeiture, increased coordination between law departments and funding boosts as parts of the new efforts, all of which fall under the DOJ’s Project Safe Neighborhoods program.
“Not just our drug laws, but everything from RICO to our tax laws to our firearms laws,” Sessions continued. “Just like we took Al Capone off the streets with our tax laws, we will use whatever laws we have to get MS-13 off of our streets,” he said.
Emphasizing that a quarter of MS-13’s 40,000 members live in the United States, Sessions called for international coordination to limit the gang’s reach.
The attorney general credited similar cooperation with helping take down AlphaBay in July. A once-major online drug distributor, AlphaBay was responsible for countless synthetic opiod overdoses across the globe, Sessions said.
Ramped up forfeiture meanwhile carries its own set of problems, the American Civil Liberties Union warned.
“Forfeiture was originally presented as a way to cripple large-scale criminal enterprises by diverting their resources,” the group said in a statement. “But today, aided by deeply flawed federal and state laws, many police departments use forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated by profit rather than crime-fighting. For people whose property has been seized through civil asset forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes exceeding the value of the property.”
The Philadelphia Public Record reported in September that city prosecutors have been using forfeitures like these as a slush fund of sorts for years, spending between $2 million and $7 million a year on undisclosed expenses.
“There is no democratic check on how law enforcement uses forfeiture funds, and no oversight by any politically accountable body,” Molly Tack-Hooper of the Pennsylvania ACLU told Philadelphia Weekly on Friday. “The current law places very few restrictions on how they can use that money.”
In his speech Monday, Sessions emphasized the need for increased coordination between all levels of law enforcement.