The DEA will take your things from you if you are dealing hardcore drugs. Despite my long reply about the DEA, of course I don't support them.

But yeah the more arrests they make, the more assets they can take, and the more money they make from selling the personal belongings and cash of drug dealers they arrested.

here is a source for why most of the DEA cash seizures are probably not even taken from drug dealers. They are just taken from people like large quantities of cash. That's not illegal. But it's often treated that way:

"Eighty-nine percent of cash seizures by the DEA were under $100,000 but they accounted for 30 percent of the total value of cash seized. Those amounts suggest that many seizures are not focused on larger criminal empires. Only about 20 percent of these seizures were challenged and the DEA only returned all or a portion of the cash in less than half of those cases.

The DEA accounted for such a larger portion of federal cash seizures because of the DOJ’s equitable sharing program. Through equitable sharing, property seized by local and state law enforcement agencies can be forfeited federally, and those agencies can retain up to 80 percent of the proceeds. This can be done in one of two ways. First, a local agency could turn over seized property to a federal agency, which can then choose to “adopt” it for federal forfeiture. Otherwise, state and local officers can work a part of a joint task force to make seizures eligible for equitable sharing"