Texas AG and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott pushes plan to expand use of asset forfeiture.

Texas Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott articulated his plan to expand local law enforcement funding via increased asset forfeiture prosecutions:

Calling it “the most significant vulnerability to the State of Texas,” Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott outlined last week a broad strategy to secure the Texas-Mexico border. In a telephone interview, Abbott said as governor he would work to put “more boots on the ground” at the border, improve communication and cooperation between state and local and federal agencies and increase the use of technology, all of which would be funded largely by seizures of illegal assets through aggressive prosecutions of money laundering operations.

“I believe our crackdown and taking of transnational gang and international drug cartel assets will fund a large part of the expansion of operations we need on the border,” he said. He cited several examples in which investigators in a unit within the Attorney General’s Office that focused on money laundering cases related to cartels seized assets worth millions of dollars from drug cartel members.

The effects of such investigations — almost always done in cooperation with other law enforcement agencies — are two-fold, he said. They provide funding for the law enforcement agencies that investigate them and they show cartels that “coming through Texas is a money-losing proposition,” he said. “If you cut off the lifeblood, they can’t live without it. The cost of doing business is just too high,” he added. Jacob Fischler, Abbott promises more funding for border security, The McAllen Monitor, 27 July 2013.

It is unclear whether he plans to weaken state asset forfeiture reforms put into place after Texas’s many forfeiture-induced scandals or, if he wants local departments to chase asset forfeiture dollars via the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal equitable program, how he might square surrendering budget authority to the Feds with his defense of 10th Amendment principles.