>He was on his way back to Northern California to pay someone for some stuff that had been fronted + re-up.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this very much sounds like "drugs". If that's the case, your point about him never being involved in "heroin" sales is now just semantics, because he's still engaged, to some degree, in the movement of drugs between states.

It's not semantics because that was their justification for the search. They claimed to have been following him since Chicago even though he had only got on the train in Fargo. They also claimed that the money was from the sale of heroin, another lie. I'm not saying what he was involved in was legal, I'm saying that he was targeted and arrested on false pretenses.

I'm thinking they saw a young guy on a cross country trip who had purchased a ticket on short notice and decided to go after him. Maybe he was "acting suspicious" if he was nervous, but I kind of doubt that; he used to take beta blockers for that type of thing and what he was doing wasn't really out of the ordinary for him. Maybe they saw he had a history of taking the train that route. I don't know. But I do know that they lied in their justification for making contact with him.