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The Curious Case of the Dog and the Abortion Pills
https://lux-magazine.com/article/abortion-pills-usps/The Curious Case of the Dog and the Abortion Pills
How the police and the Postal Service can combine forces to crack down on abortion by mail
By Debbie Nathan
Photos by Suzi Altman
This story is co-published with The Intercept.
[...]
What will happen to abortion pills by mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further. Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt pregnant women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.
My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet. The documents I received after my FOIA request are highly redacted but still reveal many details about a federal investigation that began less than two years ago in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion pills were seized. The bust followed on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and came after a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion pills should be banned from the mail.
The Jackson investigation apparently also employed what’s called a mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them. The return address for the hot pink envelope in Jackson included an unused post office box number, the sort of information postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to each other.
[...]
The investigations can rely on outside help. USPIS doesn’t have its own sniffer K-9s, so it employs local police dogs and their handlers to check the mail for contraband and provide the probable cause needed to get warrants. The arrangement occurs even in jurisdictions like Mississippi, where abortion is now banned under state law and local cops enforce state law. Steed, the dog handler from a nearby Rankin County police department who responded to the pink envelope in Jackson, was recently deputized as a USPIS investigator, and he uses office space in the agency’s regional headquarters at the Jackson postal center.
[...]
How the police and the Postal Service can combine forces to crack down on abortion by mail
By Debbie Nathan
Photos by Suzi Altman
This story is co-published with The Intercept.
[...]
What will happen to abortion pills by mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further. Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt pregnant women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.
My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet. The documents I received after my FOIA request are highly redacted but still reveal many details about a federal investigation that began less than two years ago in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion pills were seized. The bust followed on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and came after a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion pills should be banned from the mail.
The Jackson investigation apparently also employed what’s called a mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them. The return address for the hot pink envelope in Jackson included an unused post office box number, the sort of information postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to each other.
[...]
The investigations can rely on outside help. USPIS doesn’t have its own sniffer K-9s, so it employs local police dogs and their handlers to check the mail for contraband and provide the probable cause needed to get warrants. The arrangement occurs even in jurisdictions like Mississippi, where abortion is now banned under state law and local cops enforce state law. Steed, the dog handler from a nearby Rankin County police department who responded to the pink envelope in Jackson, was recently deputized as a USPIS investigator, and he uses office space in the agency’s regional headquarters at the Jackson postal center.
[...]
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