Under the law of asset forfeiture, a person loses ownership of money and property that were used in or constitute the proceeds of a crime. Asset forfeiture is a significant financial consequence for people who have (in some cases, tenuous) contact with the criminal system. Asset forfeiture also is a crucial way that federal, state, and local governments generate revenue from criminal investigation and prosecution. In the federal system, the government’s acquisition of forfeited assets (such as cash, electronics, cars, and homes) brings in around $2 billion in annual revenue. Every year, the federal government transfers hundreds of millions of these dollars to state and local law enforcement agencies, making asset forfeiture a lucrative federal-state enterprise.

This Article makes three contributions. First, it provides the first scholarly examination of how the federal government has engaged in asset forfeiture by using comprehensive data of the Department of Justice’s roughly 1.2 million federal asset forfeitures between 1998 and 2019 matched to county-level population data over that period.

Second, this empirical analysis reveals inequality in the government’s use of asset forfeiture. Specifically, the government more actively engages in revenue-generating forfeitures in districts with larger Black and Hispanic populations. This disparity is partly driven by the government’s extensive use of forfeiture in the districts that border Mexico—a phenomenon the literature has not yet recognized. The same disparity is not present in forfeitures that do not generate revenue. Forfeiture thus resembles a practice by which governments derive revenue from fines and fees in ways that unfairly burdens poor communities of color.

Finally, I argue that by lacking the empirical scrutiny this Article provides, much scholarly and public debate about asset forfeiture misunderstands both the harms and benefits of asset forfeiture by overlooking asset forfeiture’s potential to make communities safer while undercounting important individual and distributive harms. This Article concludes by considering avenues for reform.