Many ICE Agents Lose Ability to Spy on Immigrants’ Payments to Family Back Home

For years Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes defended the Transaction Record Analysis Center a secretive financial surveillance scheme that tracks wire transfers between the U S and Mexico sent via Western Union and other companies As of late as April in response to The Intercept s reporting her office brushed off fears that the Trump administration might use TRAC content to hit its deportation quotas To our understanding there is nothing in the statistics TRAC collects that provides information on an individual s immigration status disclosed Mayes s spokesperson Richie Taylor in an email in April and TRAC information is used exclusively for money laundering investigations But earlier this summer after The Intercept filed a general records lawsuit for documents about TRAC Mayes took attempts 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 reported in an emailed declaration and her office has barred usage by agents and functionaries in these agencies for misuse of the records I continue to advocacy the use of this figures to assist law enforcement in our mission of defeating transnational drug cartels Mayes revealed but this records 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 input Taylor explained And if there are any additional instances of misuse of the content Attorney General Mayes is prepared to deplatform and ban additional agencies from using the database Related The Extraordinary Nonprofit That Helps ICE Spy on Wire Transfers Mayes s office acknowledged the shift in guidelines in response to questions from The Intercept about two instances this year in which agents from Homeland Assurance Investigations ICE s intelligence wing used TRAC facts to locate noncitizens for deportation who were not accused of any crime aside from unauthorized presence in the country In latest months thousands of HSI agents have been diverted to help ERO in removal operations The American Civil Liberties Union recounted The Intercept that Mayes was right to recognize the extraordinary harm that will flow from feeding this highly sensitive and revealing statistics to the federal leadership s indiscriminate mass deportation machine but that her belated actions 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 Prevention Investigations who have been unleashed by this administration to pursue civil immigration deportation efforts announced Nathan Freed Wessler deputy director of the ACLU s Speech Privacy and System 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 mentioned Daniel Werner a senior staff attorney with Just Futures Law whose clients tried to challenge TRAC in federal court in an emailed comment 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 has long dismissed concerns TRAC s president Rich Lebel wrote in an emailed comment in April that under TRAC s very clear details use initiative the database is to be utilized for money laundering examination purposes Previously Lebel pointed to technical measures TRAC had taken to guard against prospective misuses including details tokenization and routine monitoring of the system by TRAC personnel Under an agreement Mayes s office signed with TRAC in users were required to promise not to abuse their access and declare the underlying predicate offense for a given query But until in the past few days TRAC users could select something else as the predicate offense Mayes s office described 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 explained 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 statistics 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 Attorney General Kris Mayes speaks about the execution of inmate Aaron Brian Gunches at the Arizona State Prison on March in Florence Ariz Photo Darryl Webb AP Photo The Intercept and other outlets have identified two instances this year in which HSI agents apparently used TRAC content to identify and locate a noncitizen for deportation In both instances the agents searched wire transfer details before TRAC implemented the additional query restrictions in late June In one episode an HSI agent in Hawaii described how she used information from a money remittance company to track down a Mexican man based on instances when he sent individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico between October and May The affair was first shared 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 days at a federal detention center in Honolulu He will remain behind bars as he awaits deportation according to Civil Beat Read Our Complete Coverage The War on Immigrants The Intercept identified a second instance of an HSI agent using wire transfer information as part of the deportation crackdown in El Paso Texas In January Monica who lives on the north side of El Paso less than miles from the U S limit received a wire transfer from her family in Mexico It was not a massive transfer less than 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 explained Monica a mother and homemaker first came to the U S in on a visa that expired in She s never been accused or convicted of any crimes Beckett reported Her only crime is overstaying her visa A insufficient months after Monica received the transfer via Western Union a special agent for ICE detected her while conducting law enforcement database queries HSI special agent Garrett Corley later wrote in a review filed as part of Monica s deportation proceedings Related Mahmoud Khalil Won His Freedom Despite the Best Efforts of ICE s Intelligence Unit Court records from other cases show how HSI s investigative focus has changed In court records from 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 described Corley s legwork on a multistate examination 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 facilitators 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 according to Corley s description and then brought her to the El Paso System Processing Center Beckett mentioned Monica was later distributed from detention on bond Corley s statement 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 as part of a settlement agreement with Western Union As of July the TRAC database contained records about nearly million transfers including transfers of 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 records 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 figures about millions of wire transfers to TRAC according to findings published by Sen Ron Wyden D-Ore in and 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 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 constituents records request to Mayes s office which is right now 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 material for purposes beyond money laundering investigations We have long warned about the dangers of this kind of indiscriminate bulk surveillance Wessler noted of Monica s event Executives like to say they will reserve this surveillance for only serious financial crimes but its apparent use to fuel the federal establishment s indiscriminate deportation dragnet shows why Arizona must shut down the TRAC database this instant 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 disclosed that his client s situation 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 In the present day they target immigrants On the morrow they ll target U S citizens he commented They want people a day They re going to do whatever it takes The post Various ICE Agents Lose Ability to Spy on Immigrants Payments to Family Back Home appeared first on The Intercept