Imagine you are sitting in your home when the police knock on your door. Officers enter and search your entire home, seizing your personal property. After your property is taken, you are given a slip of paper listing your seized belongings. The police then leave, and you are left with few answers.
Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened to Luis Garcia.

Luis lives in Mesa, Arizona, and is a contractor for the Univision television network. He is also active in his community and helps organize local youth soccer events. Last fall, Luis collected $5,300 for the Copa Univision Arizona 2019 Youth Soccer Tournament from various local teams. After collecting the money for the tournament, Luis returned home. Soon after, his Mesa home was raided by the Scottsdale Police Department based on an investigation into Luis’s adult son. Although Luis was not implicated in any wrongdoing, the police searched his entire home. When law enforcement found $5,300 that Luis had collected for the soccer tournament, they took it as evidence, despite there being no connection between the money and any alleged illegal behavior.
Luis was never charged with or suspected of connection to any crime. Yet police seized his property without direction, instruction, or mechanism by which to get it back. To ensure that the Youth Soccer Tournament could still take place, Luis took out two title loans on his two cars to cover the seized funds. In short, the Department seized an innocent person’s money with no cause or explanation.
In October, the Goldwater Institute sent a letter to the Scottsdale Police Department demanding the return of the $5,300 to rectify the erroneous seizure. Shortly after the Department received Goldwater’s letter, we learned that Luis’s funds would be returned to him.