Immigrants sue Western Union, ICE for spying on transfer data

A U.S. senator recently revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement for years secretly spied on wire transfers of more than $500 to or from California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico, without probable cause or a warrant.

Now immigrants who say their remittances to relatives abroad were caught up in a massive dragnet are suing the government, as well as wire-transfer behemoth Western Union and other companies that gave records to law enforcement.

Among the allegations in the lawsuit: Law enforcement officials bragged in a PowerPoint presentation that they had tracked “suspicious” money transfers from people with “Middle Eastern names” or “Middle Eastern/Arabic names.”

ICE officials said they would not comment on pending litigation. The agency earlier this year said it had paused its requests for money transfer records.

Western Union also declined to comment.

“Our company takes its privacy and compliance responsibilities very seriously. As a matter of policy, however, we do not comment on pending civil litigation,” a spokesperson said late Monday.

Western Union has previously said it handed over the records in order to comply with a court order.

The legal action stems from disclosures made this year by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who said officials of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations briefed his staff on the program in February.

According to Wyden, ICE used a type of administrative subpoena to obtain 6 million records since 2019 about money transfers greater than $500 to or from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.

Wyden supports targeted investigations into smugglers but opposes dragnet-style sweeps, he wrote in a March letter to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.

“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, HSI and other agencies should focus their resources on individuals actually suspected of breaking the law,” Wyden wrote.

The lawsuit, which was filed Monday by the advocacy organization Just Futures Law, along with the law firm Edelson PC, claims that federal law enforcement officials were able to access millions of money transfer records from across the Southwest and conduct broad searches of the information without a warrant or court order.

The government failed to notify individuals that it had accessed their private information, the suit alleges.

“This dragnet has been operating under the radar with no public scrutiny,” said Yaman Salahi, an attorney at Edelson PC who filed the suit.

The sweep of information gathered violated the individuals’ federal financial privacy rights, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawyers seek to not only end federal access to the money transfer data but to force the government to delete the records it already has.

“The folks who tend to use these services tend to be unbanked people, oftentimes people of color or immigrant communities who do not have viable alternatives. Being put into a database where ICE has access puts those communities and people at risk,” said Daniel Werner, senior staff attorney at Just Futures Law. “ICE is basically infiltrating a central infrastructure that immigrant communities rely on.”

The immigrants who are suing the federal government and the transfer companies were shocked to learn that their information had been accessed, the suit states.

Money transfer companies are used by immigrants to send remittances to family back home.

Every year, roughly $30 billion is sent from the U.S. to Mexico, the lawsuit states. There are 200 million migrant workers in the U.S. who rely on money transfer companies to send money abroad.

The transfer records that law enforcement officials could have obtained include names, addresses, identification numbers and other information.

Ismael Cordero, a Northern California man who used to send regular money transfers to family living abroad, is among the plaintiffs in the case.

He is worried that his information has been shared with law enforcement and was not informed of the records being handed to law enforcement officials.

The lawsuit details how money transfer records have been sent to a database called Transaction Record Analysis Center that facilitates local, federal and state law enforcement access to bulk data. The database contains 145 million records in total. The archive began in its current form in 2014, when the Arizona Financial Crimes Task Force, comprising state law enforcement entities and with participation from DHS, entered into an agreement with Western Union for the transaction data, the suit claims.

The lawsuit states that while ICE officials publicly said this year that they no longer would issue the subpoenas, they were still able to access the database.

“It highlights the risks of these kinds of tools where there is not sufficient supervision or protections,” Salahi said. “To me, that’s nothing but racial stereotyping that can’t reliably produce leads or guide investigations.”