It was a tip that brought a dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes.
Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip strode around and, when he got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics. That claim became evidence to get a warrant to open the envelope.
This, though, was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit.” They were made in India, and their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.
As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect.
About two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. in 2023 were done with mifepristone and misoprostol, the two-pill combination found in AntiPreg and similar products. Most were prescribed by clinicians at brick-and-mortar offices or through telehealth appointments. The World Health Organization advises that the pills are so safe in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy that supervision by a medical clinician is not needed. Taking the pills without clinician oversight is called “self-managed abortion.”
The practice has become so widespread that the New York Times estimated last year that it comprised 10 percent of all abortions being done in America. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, has not approved the importation of foreign-made misoprostol or mifepristone pills, much less their distribution without a prescription.
The non-approved pills tend to enter the U.S. in bulk, most passing surreptitiously through customs at land borders and international airports. Many are delivered to feminist-oriented mutual aid groups who distribute them at low cost or for free. Others go to people who are just trying to turn a profit. Both groups repackage their international bulk shipments as single doses and mail them domestically — typically from post offices.
Today, you can order AntiPreg and similar brands by clicking links at websites including that of Plan C, an online clearinghouse for information about how to get abortion pills through the mail. One dose costs as little as $38, including shipping, and can be cheaper if the patient seeks financial assistance. The pills can be delivered in as quickly as four days.
In large part thanks to such easy availability, more people in the U.S. today are having abortions than before the fall of Roe.
Photo: Suzi Altman for Lux Magazine
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 local Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt 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 hot pink envelope sent from Jackson had a return address with an unused post office box number, which postal inspectors can use to link parcels together.
Laurie Bertram Roberts, a reproductive justice activist, is concerned about the rise of an anti-abortion government. They lead the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund in Jackson, providing support to fellow Mississippians facing any reproductive choice, whether it’s having a baby, traveling out of state for an abortion, or using pills at home.
In a post-Roe state like Mississippi where abortion is strictly prohibited, Bertram Roberts also works as a doula, supporting individuals at the end of their pregnancies, regardless of whether it’s due to miscarriage or abortion. They emphasized that they do not inquire about the reasons behind the decision.
Collaboration between federal regional offices and local authorities, such as U.S postal workers and a city K-9 cop, led to the investigation of the pink envelope. While no arrests have been made in Mississippi for aiding in abortions, Bertram Roberts remains wary of potential criminalization. They expressed concern about the possibility of people facing legal consequences.
The USPIS, the investigative branch of the Postal Service, has been aware of the illegal distribution of foreign-made abortion pills in the U.S. for years. Despite FDA regulations prohibiting this activity, the USPIS stated that they focus on enforcing federal laws and do not actively pursue pill mailers, even in states with abortion bans.
The use of local police dogs in federal investigations poses a risk to abortion-seekers, as local law enforcement could potentially conduct their own investigations and share information with anti-abortion authorities. While police dogs are trained to detect specific illegal drugs, they are not trained to identify the ingredients in abortion pills, which are currently legal. The reliability of K-9s in forensic investigations is questionable.
It is unclear why a police dog would alert on abortion pills, which are not narcotics. One theory suggests that the pills may have been contaminated during manufacturing or packaging, potentially by trace amounts of drugs such as marijuana. Another possibility is that handlers may have inadvertently left behind molecules of narcotics that only K-9s can detect.
Some police believe in theories like these, which are difficult to disprove. However, Elisa Wells of Plan C stated that laboratory analyses of foreign-made abortion pills have shown them to be pure, without any narcotics.
Additionally, K-9s can be influenced by their handlers through a process called “cueing,” where subtle cues can lead the dogs to alert even in the absence of illegal substances. This phenomenon has been studied by researchers like Lisa Lit, who found that dogs often alerted based on cues rather than actual scents.
Some policing agencies now require K-9 handlers to wear body cameras to monitor for cueing. However, USPIS does not use body cameras. Lawrence Myers, a retired professor, warned that unacknowledged handler errors can turn K-9s into mere “warrants on a leash.”
After a warrant is issued and a parcel is opened, a mail cover can provide further information for an investigation. The U.S. Postal Service conducts mail covers without the need for a warrant, allowing law enforcement agencies to collect data from the outside of envelopes or packages.
Frederick Lane, an attorney specializing in privacy issues, compared the outside of envelopes to social media in terms of privacy. He noted that the materials from the Mississippi FOIA request suggest that USPIS used a mail cover to expand its investigation into abortion pills. Martel, the USPIS spokesperson, declined to comment, citing the agency’s routine practice of withholding information from the public to protect its investigations.
Lane explained that the USPIS often obtains warrants to search mailed items by using K-9s to alert for narcotics, even when investigators are not specifically looking for narcotics.
In a recent incident in Jackson, a USPIS inspector revealed that data from outside a pink envelope was collected to locate additional envelopes with pills. This tactic allows authorities to centralize their search by tracking related materials from various post offices as they converge at the Jackson distribution center.
The Postal Service’s practice of photographing and digitizing mail has enabled the comparison and storage of data from various items, facilitating investigative work.
The information obtained from mail covers is handed over to law enforcement without much oversight, according to Lane.
The potential collaboration between law enforcement agencies and the postal service poses a threat to abortion rights, as highlighted by Nathan Freed Wessler from the ACLU.
The Comstock Act, a federal law criminalizing the import and mailing of materials for immoral use, could be revived under a Trump administration, potentially impacting access to abortion pills.
Plans to enforce the Comstock Act against mail-order abortion operations have been discussed by Republican lawmakers, raising concerns about restrictions on abortion rights.
If Comstock is enforced, sending abortion pills through the mail could become a felony, and even clinicians in states where surgical abortions are legal may face obstacles in receiving necessary items.
Local police dogs, like Rip in Jackson, have been instrumental in identifying suspicious packages, leading to seizures of items related to abortion pills through mail covers.
Additional envelopes containing pills were seized across the country, with employees at a postal service branch in Jackson acting as tipsters according to USPIS. Fenton Stevens, the branch manager of LaFleur, expressed no recollection of workers reporting envelopes suspected of containing abortion pills. He questioned how someone could identify abortion pills in a package and emphasized that such activities were not conducted at their branch.
The US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) photographed vehicles believed to be connected to the mailing of the envelopes, which were later reviewed by Laurie Bertram Roberts. The case was then referred to the federal prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of Mississippi, where an assistant U.S. attorney was assigned to handle it.
By December 20, more than seventy envelopes had been confiscated. Shortly before Christmas, the Office of Legal Counsel for the Department of Justice issued an opinion suggesting that physicians and clinicians mailing prescription abortion pills to states where abortion is illegal could not be prosecuted under the Comstock Act.
The Justice Department’s rationale was that the pills had various medical uses besides abortion, such as managing miscarriages. This ambiguity made it difficult to determine if the intention behind mailing the pills was illegal. However, the opinion did not protect non-clinicians from potential charges.
In Jackson, the final seven envelopes were seized on January 6, marking one month since the investigation began. The mail cover, which allowed for surveillance, had to be renewed after this period. Subsequently, no more pill seizures occurred in Jackson.
No indictments have been made, and the status of the case remains undisclosed. A retired inspector mentioned that the political climate may have deterred prosecution for abortion pills under the current administration.
Despite efforts by a postal worker, a detection dog named Rip, and a federal agency’s reluctance to intervene in abortion-related matters, nearly 100 individuals did not receive the requested medication contained in pink packages. Please rewrite this sentence.
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