Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs Are Intercepting Abortion Pills in the Mail

It was a tip that introduced a canine to the principle put up workplace in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An worker there had reported seeing somebody within the foyer placing tablets into sizzling pink envelopes.

Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small metropolis of Richland, simply south of Jackson, walked right into a again room on the put up workplace the place one of many envelopes had been put aside. Steed, a Okay-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer canine. Rip strode round and, when he bought to the pink envelope, sat down. In keeping with information obtained by a Freedom of Info Act request, Steed stated this meant the canine had smelled narcotics. That declare grew to become proof to get a warrant to open the envelope.

This, although, was no atypical drug bust. Because it turned out, there have been tablets contained in the package deal, however they weren’t the sort that Rip or different police Okay-9s are educated to detect. The envelope contained 5 tablets labeled “AntiPreg Equipment.” They had been made in India, and their medical function is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, on the time the pinnacle of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, informed me this was precisely what the preliminary tipster had suspected.

Because it turned out, there have been tablets contained in the package deal, however they weren’t the sort that Rip or different police Okay-9s are educated to detect.

About two-thirds of abortions within the U.S. in 2023 had been achieved with mifepristone and misoprostol, the two-pill mixture present in AntiPreg and related merchandise. Most had been prescribed by clinicians at brick-and-mortar places of work or by telehealth appointments. The World Well being Group advises that the tablets are so secure within the first 12 weeks of being pregnant that supervision by a medical clinician isn’t wanted. Taking the tablets with out clinician oversight known as “self-managed abortion.”

The follow has change into so widespread that the New York Instances estimated final yr that it comprised 10 p.c of all abortions being achieved in America. The U.S. Meals and Drug Administration, nonetheless, has not accepted the importation of foreign-made misoprostol or mifepristone tablets, a lot much less their distribution with no prescription. 

The non-approved tablets are inclined to enter the U.S. in bulk, most passing surreptitiously by customs at land borders and worldwide airports. Many are delivered to feminist-oriented mutual help teams who distribute them at low value or free of charge. Others go to people who find themselves simply attempting to show a revenue. Each teams repackage their worldwide bulk shipments as single doses and mail them domestically — sometimes from put up places of work.

As we speak, you possibly can order AntiPreg and related manufacturers by clicking hyperlinks at web sites together with that of Plan C, a web-based clearinghouse for details about how one can get abortion tablets by the mail. One dose prices as little as $38, together with delivery, and will be cheaper if the affected person seeks monetary help. The tablets will be delivered in as rapidly as 4 days.

Largely due to such straightforward availability, extra folks within the U.S. at this time are having abortions than earlier than the autumn of Roe.

What will occur to abortion-pills-by-mail and the individuals who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? Because the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA paperwork present, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway throughout a Democratic administration. Below a Trump regime, issues would possibly go a lot additional.

Whoever is in energy, the incident in Jackson offers a possible window into the long run — one by which freelancing native Postal Service workers and officers can name on native cops to halt ladies from accessing reproductive care and doubtlessly cost and arrest these offering or utilizing abortion remedy.

My FOIA request requested for information from previous years of investigations of people that’d used the mail to ship tablets. The paperwork I bought again present how a prepared administration would possibly go after distributors. The feds may even lend assist to police in states which have criminalized abortion care as they pursue instances underneath native legal guidelines. Pregnant individuals who order the medicines may get caught within the dragnet.

The paperwork I obtained after my FOIA request are extremely redacted however nonetheless reveal many particulars a couple of federal investigation that started lower than two years in the past in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion tablets had been seized. The bust adopted on the heels of the Supreme Court docket overturning Roe v. Wade, and got here after a bunch of anti-abortion docs filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion tablets ought to be banned from the mail.

The Jackson investigation apparently additionally employed what’s known as a mail cowl: a little-known Postal Service technique for amassing information about folks suspected of committing crimes. Utilizing an unlimited database of photos of the skin of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally evaluate names, addresses, and different info on one merchandise to others. And the findings will be freely shared with virtually any legislation enforcement company that requests them. The return handle for the recent pink envelope in Jackson included an unused put up workplace field quantity, the form of info postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to one another.

Reproductive justice activist Laurie Bertram Roberts worries about an anti-abortion regime taking energy. They direct the Jackson-based Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which assists fellow Mississippians with any reproductive resolution they make, from having a child, to leaving the state to go to an abortion clinic, to utilizing tablets at house.

In a state the place abortion is strictly banned post-Roe, Bertram Roberts can also be a doula. Together with different doulas, they’ve organized assist for folks on the finish of their pregnancies, together with these which don’t come to time period. Whether or not that finish is due miscarriage or to abortion is immaterial. “We don’t ask,” they stated.

The pink-envelope investigation got here out of a form of collaboration between the feds’ regional places of work and an area official: U.S postal employees and a metropolis Okay-9 cop. Although nobody in Mississippi has but been arrested for serving to perform an abortion, Bertram Roberts fears that synergy. They leaned ahead and tensed their lips as I opened my laptop and pulled up photos I’d obtained from the FOIA request: pictures the USPIS had taken, in a put up workplace car parking zone, of automobiles suspected of belonging to the one who mailed the tablets. 

Bertram Roberts peered anxiously on the display. “I don’t acknowledge them!” they stated. Their face relaxed, however they shook their head. “The factor I fear about most is folks getting criminalized.”

The USPIS is the investigative arm of the nation’s Postal Service. The company has recognized for a minimum of the previous decade, based on FOIA paperwork, that foreign-made abortion tablets are coming into the U.S. and being distributed in amount with out prescription. FDA rules maintain that that is unlawful; the senders will be punished with felony penalties.

Days after Roe was overturned in June 2022, the USPIS introduced that it might not proactively pursue tablet mailers, even in states the place abortion was being banned.

“We implement federal legislation,” USPIS spokesperson Michael Martel informed me. “We have now little interest in implementing state legal guidelines.”

He stated, nonetheless, that the USPIS does go after individuals who import nonapproved prescription drugs and people with out medical credentials who mail prescribed drugs.

The investigations can depend on outdoors assist. USPIS doesn’t have its personal sniffer Okay-9s, so it employs native police canine and their handlers to test the mail for contraband and supply the possible trigger wanted to get warrants. The association happens even in jurisdictions like Mississippi, the place abortion is now banned underneath state legislation and native cops implement state legislation. Steed, the canine handler from a close-by Rankin County police division who responded to the pink envelope in Jackson, was just lately deputized as a USPIS investigator, and he makes use of workplace house within the company’s regional headquarters on the Jackson postal middle.

Utilizing native canine creates threat for abortion-seekers. With the put up workplace inviting native legislation enforcement to help with federal investigations, native police may theoretically do their very own investigations, by copying names and addresses from the mail. They usually may move that info to anti-abortion district attorneys. 

Police canine, nonetheless, are educated to odor solely the unlawful medicine heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, fentanyl, and cocaine, not the elements in abortion tablets, which at present stay authorized. And the Okay-9s’ forensic reliability is suspect.

Why would a police canine alert on abortion tablets within the first place, once they’re not narcotics?

Martel, the USPIS nationwide spokesperson, speculated that the tablets present in Jackson had been contaminated within the manufacturing course of by hint quantities of a drug comparable to marijuana, or maybe somebody was dealing with narcotics once they did the packing and left molecules behind that solely canines’ super-sensitive noses can detect.

Theories alongside these strains are widespread amongst police, and so they’re inherently unimaginable to disprove. Elisa Wells, a co-founder and co-director of Plan C, is skeptical. She stated her group has carried out laboratory analyses of assorted manufacturers of foreign-made abortion tablets. They’ve all been pure, she stated, and nobody has ever complained about their containing narcotics.

There may be one more reason why a Okay-9 can zero in on a package deal that’s devoid of illicit medicine. Animal researchers name it “cueing.” Canines are exquisitely delicate to the trivia of a human’s posture, eye actions, and different delicate behaviors. Handlers wishing to develop possible trigger to do intrusive searches for narcotics can coax their canine into drug-alerting habits. To get a reward, the canine will alert, even when nothing unlawful is current. (Steed, the Okay-9 handler, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Cueing will be deliberate, however it’s extra usually unconscious. In 2011, Lisa Lit, a researcher on the College of California, Davis, revealed a now-famous research by which she informed the handlers of a number of police canine that their Okay-9s could be trying to find “goal scents” hidden randomly in a number of containers. She put crimson tape on some containers and stated it marked the targets. In actuality, not one of the containers had scents. Even so, many of the canine alerted on containers, particularly these with crimson tape.

Some policing companies now require Okay-9 handlers to put on physique cameras to test in the event that they’re cueing their canine. USPIS, although, doesn’t use physique cameras, based on Martin, the previous head of the workplace in Jackson. Chris Picou, a supervising deputy for Rankin County’s drug interdiction items who oversees many Central Mississippi police Okay-9s, together with Steed’s canine Rip, informed me in June that he had by no means heard of the Lit research about cueing.

Lawrence Myers, a retired professor of veterinary medication at Auburn College with in depth expertise researching the reliability of legislation enforcement canine and their human handlers, stated unacknowledged handler errors within the service of legislation enforcement can flip Okay-9s into mere “warrants on a leash.”

Once a warrant is issued and the parcel has been opened, a mail cowl may help an investigation barrel ahead.

Mail covers have been supplied for generations by the U.S. Postal Service. They require neither a warrant nor some other Fourth Modification management. Even so, they permit legislation enforcement companies, from the FBI to native police to the USPIS itself, to gather info from the skin of an envelope or package deal. Yearly, the put up workplace images each one of many billions of items of mail that it processes. And yearly, it approves 1000’s of requests from legislation enforcement for mail covers of people.

“We have a tendency to think about first-class mail as comparatively inviolable. However the outdoors of the envelope is the equal of social media,” stated Frederick Lane, an legal professional and author who focuses on tensions between the Fourth Modification’s assure of privateness and cybertechnology’s rising capability to snoop.

Lane, who’s writing a e-book known as “The Cybertraps of Selection: Being pregnant and Privateness in a Submit-Roe World,” has investigated mail covers. He examined the abortion supplies from the Mississippi FOIA request and stated they represent robust proof that the USPIS bought a mail cowl from the Postal Service to enlarge its abortion tablet investigation. (Martel, the USPIS spokesperson, declined to remark, saying solely that the company routinely withholds info from the general public with a purpose to shield its investigations.)

Lane stated that utilizing Okay-9s to alert for narcotics is likely one of the most typical ways in which the USPIS obtains warrants to look within mailed gadgets, even when investigators don’t actually consider they’re searching for narcotics.

As soon as the inspector bought within the pink envelope in Jackson, he stated, it seems that the USPIS collected information from outdoors the envelope — seemingly the unused put up workplace field quantity within the return handle — to find further envelopes with tablets. The tactic would enable authorities to centralize the search by monitoring associated supplies from disparate put up places of work as they arrive collectively on the Jackson distribution middle.

Lane famous the Postal Service began photographing mail and digitizing it years in the past to cut back the price of sorting. After 9/11, and with the event of ever extra subtle digital pictures, the information recovered from one merchandise could possibly be in contrast with myriad different gadgets and saved on ever-growing databases. Today, the power to do that work “is rising by leaps and bounds,” Lane stated.

“In the event you begin involving native legislation enforcement in a state that’s attempting to ban entry to abortion, together with abortion remedy, you might be placing sufferers in danger.”

The knowledge a mail cowl extracts is handed over to legislation enforcement, with nearly no questions requested.

“Mechanisms for the put up workplace serving to native cops are in place with none supervision,” Lane stated. He known as the cooperation between policing companies and the postal service “a sweet retailer for legislation enforcement.”

That teamwork doubtlessly threatens abortion rights, based on Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privateness, and Expertise Venture.

“In the event you begin involving native legislation enforcement in a state that’s attempting to ban entry to abortion, together with abortion remedy, you might be placing sufferers in danger,” he informed me. “People who’re attempting to entry medical care mustn’t must worry the federal authorities coming after them. The specter of hurt to folks as soon as native legislation enforcement will get wind of it in a hostile state could possibly be actually critical.”

The different potential federal menace to abortion rights is what’s colloquially known as the Comstock Act. Handed by Congress in 1873, it has been dormant for many years however stays on the books as 18 U.S. Codes 1461 and 1462. Comstock criminalizes importing and mailing supplies which, based on the language of the legislation, are “meant for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.”

Amongst hard-line anti-abortion activists who’ve Trump’s ear, plans are already afoot to revive the Comstock Act if he wins. These days, Trump and his vice presidential operating mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, have been attempting to distance themselves from unpopular calls to additional prohibit abortion. Vance just lately stated he helps abortion tablets being authorized, however earlier than coming into the race, he was publicly in favor of banning them from the mail.

Vance and different Republican lawmakers final yr despatched a letter to the Division of Justice asking for the Comstock Act to be enforced and for the division to “shut down all mail-order abortion operations.” As well as, Venture 2025, the Heritage Basis blueprint for turning the nation sharply proper, requires utilizing the Comstock Act to ban abortion tablets from the mail. Trump and his marketing campaign have additionally been attempting to distance themselves from Venture 2025, however Vance complicates issues; he wrote the foreword to a now-delayed e-book by Heritage chief and venture architect Kevin Roberts.

As a result of the Comstock Act is federal legislation and the U.S. Postal Service is a part of the manager department, Trump, if he received the upcoming election, may problem an govt order reviving Comstock as early as the primary day of his second time period. Individually, his legal professional common may authorize going after tablets within the mail.

“I’ve completely little question that underneath a Trump administration the Postal Service could be required to implement the Comstock legal guidelines towards misoprostol and mifepristone.”

“I’ve completely little question that underneath a Trump administration the Postal Service could be required to implement the Comstock legal guidelines towards misoprostol and mifepristone,” stated Lane, the cyber-privacy skilled. 

And if Comstock is revived, anybody caught sending abortion tablets, even domestically produced manufacturers not at present banned by the FDA, could possibly be charged with a felony. With the tablets formally outlined as contraband, sniffer canine could possibly be educated to odor them on their very own. Cueing by a handler would not be essential. 

And the federal government may not cease with banning tablets. Andrew Beck, a senior workers legal professional with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Venture, informed me that, underneath Comstock, even clinicians doing surgical abortions in states the place they’re authorized could possibly be lower off from receiving the gadgets they want: “gloves, surgical devices, and every thing else that’s used.”

Comstock may ban all of them from being mailed.

Rip, the native police division canine, sniffed the pink envelope in Jackson on December 7, 2022. That very same day, even earlier than the USPIS bought its warrant to look contained in the envelope, the company impounded 11 extra almost an identical packages with the identical handle that the Postal Service had decided was bogus. The truth that they had been impounded so early is proof, Lane stated, that the USPIS was utilizing a mail cowl.

December progressed and extra envelopes had been seized each few days. They had been addressed to recipients all through the nation. The USPIS claimed they had been being flagged by workers at a smaller postal service department in Jackson known as LaFleur, however extra seemingly they had been recognized by a mail cowl, based on Lane, then seized once they reached the downtown distribution and processing middle.

USPIS stated that employees at LaFleur had acted as tipsters. LaFleur department supervisor Fenton Stevens, nonetheless, informed me that he had no recollection of employees reporting envelopes suspected of containing abortion tablets.

“How may any individual know if abortion tablets are in a package deal?” he requested, incredulously. “That’s not one thing we do. We don’t take pleasure in issues like that.”

The USPIS additionally photographed automobiles presumably pushed by the individual doing the mailing — the pictures Laurie Bertram Roberts later checked out. The case was ultimately despatched to the federal prosecutor’s workplace for the Southern District of Mississippi, in downtown Jackson. An assistant U.S. legal professional was assigned to deal with it.

By December 20, over seven dozen envelopes had been seized. Then, two days earlier than Christmas, the Workplace of Authorized Counsel for the Division of Justice issued an opinion implying physicians and different clinicians who mail prescription abortion tablets into states the place abortion is prohibited couldn’t be prosecuted underneath the Comstock Act.

The Justice Division’s reasoning was that the tablets are used for a number of medical functions moreover abortion, to handle miscarriages, for example. Thus, the federal government can not know in any given case whether or not a mailer’s intention is to interrupt the legislation. (The opinion nonetheless leaves mutual help activists and different non-clinicians prone to being charged with crimes.)

In Jackson, a number of extra envelopes, the ultimate seven, had been impounded on January 6. That date marked one month since Rip had sniffed the primary pink envelope and the USPIS initiated its investigation. A mail cowl is permitted to final for one month earlier than it should both be renewed or ended. After that remaining day, seizures of tablets in Jackson ceased.

Nobody has since been indicted, and Martel, the USPIS spokesperson, declined to say if the case remains to be open.

Martin, the retired inspector, stated it’s closed.

“The U.S. legal professional’s workplace in Jackson is an excellent workplace,” he stated, “very aggressive.” However he guessed that “the political local weather,” as he put it, made a prosecution for abortion tablets “a sizzling subject no one needed to the touch.” 

No one, that’s, underneath the pro-abortion-rights Biden administration. Within the meantime, due to a Jackson-based postal employee, Rip the canine, and a federal company that claims it has no need to police abortion, almost 100 pregnant folks didn’t obtain little pink packages containing the drugs they requested.