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Court records confirm<\/span> what civil liberties advocates long warned would happen: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using sensitive data about wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico to track down immigrants for deportation.<\/p>\n The records were filed in a federal criminal case<\/a> in Hawaii, as first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat<\/a> earlier this week.<\/p>\n Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, who is originally from Mexico, was not indicted for money laundering, human trafficking, or any of the grave offenses that law enforcement officials typically offer to justify financial surveillance of wire transfers.<\/p>\n Instead, he was indicted<\/a> in early July on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico. This was the sole basis for the arrest warrant submitted by a special agent with ICE\u2019s Homeland Security Investigations, which once marketed itself as hunting down war criminals and drug smugglers but under the current Trump administration has shifted resources<\/a> toward tracking down undocumented people and critics<\/a> of Israel\u2019s war on Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n In a filing<\/a> to a federal magistrate judge on June 25, HSI Special Agent Tabitha Hanson explained how she found Cordova Murrieta using financial surveillance data.<\/p>\n Using \u201cinformation from a money remittance company,\u201d Hanson identified 11 instances when Cordova Murrieta sent \u201cindividual remittances to individuals located in Mexico\u201d October 2021 and May 2025. The financial data included an address in \u2018Aiea, near Honolulu, where ICE agents surveilled Cordova Murrieta in mid-June and later arrested him on June 26.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions \u2014 like sending money to loved ones \u2014 into grounds for immigration enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cIt is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions \u2014 like sending money to loved ones \u2014 into grounds for immigration enforcement,\u201d said Salmah Y. Rizvi, executive director of the ACLU of Hawai\u02bbi, in an emailed statement. \u201cHawaii\u2019s large immigrant community relies on remittances to support families abroad, and this kind of government overreach creates a chilling effect, making people feel unsafe even doing everyday tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n Jacquelyn Esser, a federal public defender representing Cordova Murrieta, said his was the only case she had seen in which ICE targeted an individual for deportation using remittance data.<\/p>\n Hanson\u2019s affidavit did not identify the source of such detailed financial data, and ICE did not respond to questions about her investigation.<\/p>\n But ICE agents have access to detailed data about hundreds of millions of wire transfers to Mexico through a secretive database<\/a> run by the Transaction Record Analysis Center, a nonprofit in Arizona.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Arizona state attorney general\u2019s office established TRAC in 2014 to house a database that, as of July 2024<\/a>, contained records about nearly 340 million transfers sent via companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. Like her predecessors, the current attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, powers this data dragnet using administrative subpoenas served on the companies, which send data about their customers straight to TRAC.<\/p>\n \u201cTRAC was, at least on paper, created to investigate money laundering,\u201d said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, by email. \u201cSharing the information in TRAC with ICE is a prime example of function creep, when you gather all this information for one stated purpose but later use it for something else against a person\u2019s set expectations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country have access to TRAC\u2019s data, but ICE has long played an outsized role in the nonprofit\u2019s operations. ICE agents even used legally dubious subpoenas<\/a> of their own to feed data about more than 6 million wire transfers into TRAC, until Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., exposed the arrangement in 2022.<\/p>\n\n