Lawsuit Reveals U.S. Immigration Officials Used TRAC Database to Monitor $500+ Remittances Across Southwest
A growing controversy surrounding the secret surveillance of immigrants’ financial activities has erupted into legal action, as a coalition of immigrant plaintiffs and civil rights attorneys sues U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for allegedly conducting warrantless searches of personal money transfer data through a vast, little-known surveillance system known as the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC).
The lawsuit, filed by the advocacy organization Just Futures Law and the law firm Edelson PC, accuses ICE and major money transfer companies—including Western Union—of violating the financial privacy rights of millions of immigrants. At the heart of the lawsuit is ICE’s unchecked access to TRAC, a database containing more than 340 million money transfers made between Mexico and the U.S. states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas.
Originally created to combat money laundering along the southern border, TRAC has evolved into a massive digital repository of remittance data. The database includes names, addresses, ID numbers, and transfer amounts for both senders and recipients. According to investigative reports and legal filings, ICE can access this sensitive information without a court order or probable cause.
If a migrant sends more than $500, their personal data is automatically flagged and stored in TRAC, often without their knowledge or consent. Many of those targeted are immigrants who send remittances to support family members in Latin America—contributing to an estimated $30 billion in annual transfers from the U.S. to Mexico alone.
“The folks who tend to use these services are often unbanked, people of color, or immigrant communities who do not have viable financial alternatives,” said Daniel Werner, senior staff attorney at Just Futures Law. “ICE is infiltrating a central infrastructure that immigrant communities rely on.”
The origins of ICE’s involvement with TRAC trace back to 2014, when Arizona law enforcement partnered with Western Union to monitor wire transfers. Under the Trump administration, ICE expanded its role significantly, becoming TRAC’s largest user by 2018, with more than 950 active accounts. In 2019, ICE began directly funding the system after severing ties between Western Union and the Arizona Financial Crimes Task Force, effectively gaining full control of access.
A report by The Intercept revealed that ICE used TRAC data not just for border-related investigations, but to monitor transfers to destinations as distant as China, Europe, and the Caribbean. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who has long criticized dragnet surveillance programs, warned that ICE’s use of TRAC poses grave risks to civil liberties.
“Instead of squandering resources collecting millions of transactions from people merely because they live or transact with individuals in a handful of Southwestern states or have relatives in Mexico, ICE should focus its resources on individuals actually suspected of breaking the law,” Wyden wrote in a 2023 letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include immigrants like Ismael Cordero, a Northern California man who frequently sent money to his family abroad and was shocked to learn his transactions had been accessed by law enforcement without notification.
According to the complaint, ICE agents even bragged in internal PowerPoint presentations about tracking transfers from individuals with “Middle Eastern/Arabic names,” suggesting racially discriminatory profiling.
Despite ICE’s claim earlier this year that it had paused new data requests, attorneys argue that the agency still has access to the full TRAC database and continues to exploit it without judicial oversight.
“This dragnet has been operating under the radar with no public scrutiny,” said Yaman Salahi, one of the lead attorneys. “It highlights the risks of these kinds of tools where there is not sufficient supervision or protections.”
The plaintiffs seek to terminate ICE’s access to TRAC, delete the data collected, and establish enforceable safeguards to prevent future warrantless surveillance. Civil rights groups are also calling for Congress to investigate the database and impose transparency requirements on any federal system used to monitor personal financial transactions.
As news of the lawsuit and ICE’s surveillance tactics spreads, advocacy groups warn that TRAC represents a dangerous normalization of mass monitoring—particularly of immigrant communities.
“ICE has weaponized financial data in ways that threaten the safety, dignity, and privacy of immigrants across the country,” said a spokesperson from a coalition of civil rights organizations. “This is not just about remittances. It’s about unchecked power and systemic discrimination.”
With over 200 million migrant workers around the world relying on remittances to support their families, the implications of TRAC’s data collection extend far beyond U.S. borders—raising urgent questions about privacy, profiling, and government overreach in the digital age.
