The Guardline
For years, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes defended the Transaction Record Analysis Center, a secretive financial surveillance program that tracks wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico sent via Western Union and other companies. As recently as April, in response to The Intercept’s reporting, her office brushed off fears that the Trump administration might use TRAC data to hit its deportation quotas.
“To our understanding there is nothing in the data TRAC collects that provides information on an individual’s immigration status,” said Mayes’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, in an email in April, “and TRAC data is used exclusively for money laundering investigations.”
But earlier this summer, after The Intercept filed a public records lawsuit for documents about TRAC, Mayes took steps to limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ access to the database, her office disclosed to The Intercept.
As of late June, agents from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, wing have been “de-platformed,” Mayes said in an emailed statement, and her office has “barred usage by agents and officials in these agencies for misuse of the data.”
“I continue to support the use of this data to assist law enforcement in our mission of defeating transnational drug cartels,” Mayes said, “but this data is not and has never been intended to be used for immigration purposes.”
Taylor attributed the change in Mayes’s stance to her increasing concern “about the unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration over the last several months.”
“The Attorney General’s Office is working on additional restrictions to safeguard the use of the data,” Taylor said. “And if there are any additional instances of misuse of the data, Attorney General Mayes is prepared to deplatform and ban additional agencies from using the database.”
Mayes’s office acknowledged the shift in policy in response to questions from The Intercept about two instances this year in which agents from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s intelligence wing, used TRAC data to locate noncitizens for deportation who were not accused of any crime aside from unauthorized presence in the country. In recent months, thousands of HSI agents have been diverted to support ERO in removal operations.
The American Civil Liberties Union told The Intercept that Mayes was “right to recognize the extraordinary harm that will flow from feeding this highly sensitive and revealing data to the federal government’s indiscriminate mass deportation machine,” but that her belated steps to rein in certain ICE agents’ access were not enough.
“The only way to durably protect our communities is to shut this database down.”
“Cutting off ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents still leaves access for the thousands of agents in ICE Homeland Security Investigations who have been unleashed by this administration to pursue civil immigration deportation efforts,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project in an email. “The only way to durably protect our communities is to shut this database down.”
At a bare minimum, Wessler added, “Arizona must require law enforcement agents to submit valid legal process, such as a warrant, identifying the non-immigration-related basis for the search.”
“These limited measures are insufficient to address the danger TRAC presents,” said Daniel Werner, a senior staff attorney with Just Futures Law, whose clients tried to challenge TRAC in federal court, in an emailed statement. “Even with these measures in place, the TRAC database could still be used to carry out deportations and continues to facilitate mass surveillance without individualized suspicion or court oversight.”
Leadership at TRAC, which was organized as a nonprofit by Mayes’s predecessor in 2014, has long dismissed concerns. TRAC’s president, Rich Lebel, wrote in an emailed statement in April that under TRAC’s “very clear data use policy,” the database “is to be utilized for money laundering investigation purposes.”
Previously, Lebel pointed to technical measures TRAC had taken to guard against potential misuses, including “data tokenization” and “routine monitoring of the system by TRAC personnel.” Under an agreement Mayes’s office signed with TRAC in 2023, users were required to promise not to abuse their access and declare the “underlying predicate offense” for a given query.
But until recently, TRAC users could select “something else” as the predicate offense, Mayes’s office told The Intercept. This option has been removed, and TRAC users must now select a specific racketeering offense as defined under Arizona state law.
“As long as law enforcement agents are allowed to run searches justified only by a selection from a drop-down menu, there will be abuse,” the ACLU’s Wessler said.
“As long as law enforcement agents are allowed to run searches justified only by a selection from a drop-down menu, there will be abuse.”
Lebel did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about why such a catchall category was available to TRAC users in the first place.
According to Mayes’s office, TRAC has sent emails to the hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country with access to the database, “reminding users that TRAC data must be utilized for specific money laundering purposes, and unlawfully being present in the country is not an acceptable predicate offense.” TRAC also put a notice to this effect on the database home page.
“The AG’s Office is working with TRAC to implement additional restrictions to prevent the database from being used for immigration purposes,” Taylor, the spokesperson, wrote.
The Intercept and other outlets have identified two instances this year in which HSI agents apparently used TRAC data to identify and locate a noncitizen for deportation. In both instances, the agents searched wire transfer data before TRAC implemented the additional query restrictions in late June.
In one case, an HSI agent in Hawaii described how she used “information from a money remittance company” to track down a Mexican man, based on 11 instances when he sent “individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico” between October 2021 and May 2025. The case was first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat.
The agent’s target, Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, had no criminal history and was not accused of money laundering or the other grave crimes used to justify TRAC. He was indicted on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico.
This week, Cordova Murrieta was sentenced to time served after spending 76 days at a federal detention center in Honolulu. He will remain behind bars as he awaits deportation, according to Civil Beat.
The Intercept identified a second instance of an HSI agent using wire transfer data as part of the deportation crackdown, in El Paso, Texas.
In January, Monica, who lives on the north side of El Paso, less than 10 miles from the U.S. border, received a wire transfer from her family in Mexico.
It was not a massive transfer — less than $2,000, according to Monica’s attorney, Eduardo Beckett, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that his client be identified by a pseudonym.
“Picking up money isn’t a crime,” Beckett said.
Monica, a mother and homemaker, first came to the U.S. in 2006, on a visa that expired in 2016. “She’s never been accused or convicted of any crimes,” Beckett said. “Her only crime is overstaying her visa.”
A few months after Monica received the transfer via Western Union, a special agent for ICE found her “while conducting law enforcement database queries,” HSI special agent Garrett Corley later wrote in a report filed as part of Monica’s deportation proceedings.
Court records from other cases show how HSI’s investigative focus has changed. In court records from 2023, Corley identified himself as part of HSI’s “Financial Crimes Unit,” writing that he had “conducted investigations which have involved criminal enterprises and their elements of financiers, manufacturers, distributors, and money launderers.”
Another court record, filed by Denver prosecutors in 2024, described Corley’s legwork on a multistate investigation that led to the conviction this year of a man who had produced and distributed millions of fentanyl pills.
But the Trump administration has shifted thousands of HSI agents like Corley away from hunting down money launderers, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and war criminals. Instead, Gorley used the suite of surveillance tools at his disposal to find Monica, via database queries conducted in mid-June.
Corley and an ERO officer arrested Monica on July 2, according to Corley’s report, and then brought her to the El Paso Service Processing Center. Beckett said Monica was later released from detention on bond.
Corley’s report did not specify the database he used to access the details of Monica’s wire transfer, including the address she gave as part of the Western Union transaction.
The Arizona state attorney general’s office established TRAC in 2014 as part of a settlement agreement with Western Union. As of July 2024, the TRAC database contained records about nearly 340 million transfers, including transfers of $500 or more sent via Western Union to or from Mexico, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas stretching back more than a decade.
Mayes, like her predecessors, sends administrative subpoenas to Western Union, MoneyGram, Ria, and other companies, which send bulk data about their customers straight to TRAC.
Over the years, ICE has played an outsized role in TRAC. Using legally dubious administrative subpoenas of their own, agents from two HSI offices funneled data about millions of wire transfers to TRAC, according to findings published by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in 2022 and 2023.
ICE agents have also been top users of the database, served on TRAC’s board, and at one point even funded the nonprofit’s operations.
Along with hundreds of other ICE agents, Corley’s name appears on a list of registered TRAC users from 2018, along with an ICE email address registered to Corley, who did not reply to The Intercept’s questions. The Intercept obtained the list of TRAC users from a public records request to Mayes’s office, which is currently fighting The Intercept’s lawsuit for additional records about the relationship between the state agency and TRAC.
Mayes’s office did not answer whether Corley and the HSI agent in Hawaii, Tabitha Hanson, were suspended from using TRAC. ICE did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.
For years, civil liberties advocates have warned that ICE would use TRAC data for purposes beyond money laundering investigations.
“We have long warned about the dangers of this kind of indiscriminate bulk surveillance,” Wessler said of Monica’s case. “Authorities like to say they will reserve this surveillance for only serious financial crimes, but its apparent use to fuel the federal government’s indiscriminate deportation dragnet shows why Arizona must shut down the TRAC database immediately.”
Wessler noted that Mayes’s latest restrictions on TRAC also fail “to prevent officers in other local, state, and federal agencies from running queries at ICE’s request, something we have seen in similar contexts.”
Beckett said that his client’s case should be a warning about the danger of surveillance tools like TRAC, especially in the hands of ICE.
“As Americans we should all be concerned. Today they target immigrants. Tomorrow, they’ll target U.S. citizens,” he said. “They want 3,000 people a day. They’re going to do whatever it takes.”
