ICE Hunts Down Immigrants by Spying on Their Wire Transfers

Court records confirm 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.

The records were filed in a federal criminal case in Hawaii, as first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat earlier this week.

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.

Instead, he was indicted 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’s Homeland Security Investigations, which once marketed itself as hunting down war criminals and drug smugglers but under the current Trump administration has shifted resources toward tracking down undocumented people and critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.

In a filing to a federal magistrate judge on June 25, HSI Special Agent Tabitha Hanson explained how she found Cordova Murrieta using financial surveillance data.

Using “information from a money remittance company,” Hanson identified 11 instances when Cordova Murrieta sent “individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico” October 2021 and May 2025. The financial data included an address in ‘Aiea, near Honolulu, where ICE agents surveilled Cordova Murrieta in mid-June and later arrested him on June 26.

“It is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions — like sending money to loved ones — into grounds for immigration enforcement,” said Salmah Y. Rizvi, executive director of the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, in an emailed statement. “Hawaii’s 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.”

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.

Hanson’s affidavit did not identify the source of such detailed financial data, and ICE did not respond to questions about her investigation.

But ICE agents have access to detailed data about hundreds of millions of wire transfers to Mexico through a secretive database run by the Transaction Record Analysis Center, a nonprofit in Arizona.

The Arizona state attorney general’s office established TRAC in 2014 to house a database that, as of July 2024, 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.

“TRAC was, at least on paper, created to investigate money laundering,” said Abigail Kunkler, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, by email. “Sharing 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’s set expectations.” 

Hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the country have access to TRAC’s data, but ICE has long played an outsized role in the nonprofit’s operations. ICE agents even used legally dubious subpoenas 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.

The Intercept is currently suing the Arizona attorney general and TRAC under the state public records law, after both entities refused to release documents about the database earlier this year. Neither office responded to The Intercept’s questions for this article.

But both previously downplayed the possibility that ICE agents might use TRAC data to target immigrants for deportation.

“To our understanding there is nothing in the data TRAC collects that provides information on an individuals’ immigration status and TRAC data is used exclusively for money laundering investigations,” said Mayes’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, in an email in April.

“TRAC has a very clear data use policy that states that TRAC data is to be utilized for money laundering investigation purposes,” TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, wrote in a statement by email, also in April. “That data use policy has not changed during the current administration, nor has the routine monitoring of the system by TRAC personnel for any abuses.”

But Lebel was less categorical in a statement to Civil Beat, saying that money laundering constitutes “the majority of cases” for which agents use TRAC.

Before searching the TRAC database, agents must promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query, under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023.

Hanson did not respond to questions about what role, if any, TRAC data played in her surveillance of Cordova Murrieta, and, if so, what “predicate offense” she entered before accessing the data.

“The use of financial data in this way violates our assumed privacy and raises serious Fourth Amendment concerns,” said the ACLU’s Rizvi. “If this is what’s being done today, we must ask: what else are we surrendering to unchecked surveillance under the guise of enforcement?”