Tag Archives: Nathan Freed Wessler

Latin Times: ICE Agents Lose Access to Database Tracking Immigrants’ Wire Transfers: Report

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“This data is not and has never been intended to be used for immigration purposes,” said Arizona’s Attorney General

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division have been cut off from a financial surveillance database long used to track wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico, according to disclosures reported by The Intercept.

The Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC, was created in 2014 through a settlement with Western Union and holds records of hundreds of millions of transfers. For years, civil liberties advocates have warned that ICE would use TRAC for deportations, despite official claims that it was intended only for money laundering and drug trafficking investigations.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, who oversees TRAC, confirmed to The Intercept that ERO agents had been “de-platformed” since June following concerns over misuse of the data. “This data is not and has never been intended to be used for immigration purposes,” Mayes said in a statement, while maintaining her support for its use in cartel-related cases.

The decision came after The Intercept documented two cases this year in which ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division used TRAC records to locate immigrants with no criminal history beyond unauthorized presence. One of those cases involved Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, a 48-year-old Mexican citizen living in Hawaiʻi, who was arrested in June after sending money home to family through MoneyGram and Western Union.

Cordova had lived quietly with his fiancée, running a tile business and coaching soccer before an HSI agent reviewed his remittance history and tracked him to his home in ʻAiea. He was charged with illegal reentry, pleaded guilty in August, and now awaits sentencing.

Civil liberties groups argue the Cordova case illustrates how a tool designed to stop money laundering has been repurposed for mass deportation. “We’re talking about a sweeping system going after people really for nothing more than spending their own money,” said Nick Anthony, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, to Civil Beat back on August 18.

The American Civil Liberties Union praised Mayes for restricting access but called the measures insufficient. “Cutting off ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents still leaves access for the thousands of agents in ICE Homeland Security Investigations,” said Nathan Freed Wessler of the ACLU to The Intercept.

ICE Agents Lose Access to Database Tracking Immigrants’ Wire Transfers: Report
“This data is not and has never been intended to be used for immigration purposes,” said Arizona’s Attorney General

https://www.latintimes.com/ice-agents-lose-access-database-tracking-immigrants-wire-transfers-report-589578

Straight Arrow News: Washington state agency shared license, vehicle info with ICE: Report

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A Washington state agency, the Department of Licensing, provided Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies with access to private driver’s license and vehicle information, KING 5 said in a report published on Friday, July 11. This is the case even though Washington has laws in place prohibiting local agencies from sharing personal data with the federal government if they’re using it for deportations.

A similar finding was revealed in 2018. After protests against the department sharing personal data with federal agencies, as well as legislative pressure, the Department of Licensing canceled a lot of those agreements.

KING 5 found that some of these accounts were quietly reinstated, including ones with ICE, Border Patrol and other Homeland Security entities. The news outlet wrote that this has led to a “dramatic” surge in data searches since the election of President Donald Trump, who campaigned on mass deportations.

Federal officials’ use of the Department of Licensing accounts increased by 188% since Trump was elected to a second non-consecutive term in November 2024. ICE’s account,for instance, showed searches for driver and vehicle records went from about 540 in November to 1,600 in May 2025.

The Department of Licensing said in emails to KING 5 that they are following state and federal laws, and attributed the increase in account use to significant variability” in monthly searches and a shift across “two presidential administrations with two different immigration ideologies.”

Jennie Pasquarella, the legal director of a nonprofit representing immigrants called the Clemency Project, expressed her concerns about the reopening of these accounts to KING 5.

“As ICE is ramping up their enforcement actions in our state, the last thing we want is for them to be able to search a treasure trove of information about home addresses,” she stated. “It is critical that we ensure that information is walled off so that people don’t fear accessing it.”

It’s time to roll some head in Olympia. Remove the unauthorized illegal access and fire those who permitted it.

Washington state agency shared license, vehicle info with ICE: Report
Washington state’s Department of Licensing provided ICE with access to driver’s license and vehicle information: Report

https://san.com/cc/washington-state-agency-shared-license-vehicle-info-with-ice-report

Reason: How DHS Facial Recognition Tech Spread to ICE Enforcement

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More government agencies are using facial recognition for enforcement than ever before.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is using a smartphone app to identify people based on an image of their fingerprints or face, 404 Media reported Thursday, based on a review of internal ICE emails. The expanding and repurposing of this sophisticated technology, ordinarily used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when people are entering or exiting the country, is now being used on people living in the United States to meet mass deportation and arrest quotas imposed by President Donald Trump.

The app, Mobile Fortify, enables users to verify an unknown person’s identity in the field through contactless fingerprints and facial images on ICE-issued phones, according to an email sent to all ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations personnel and obtained by 404. According to the emails, Mobile Fortify can identify a person by comparing a photo of their face across two databases—Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Traveler Verification Service database of people’s photos taken when entering the United States, and Seizure and Apprehension Workflow, described by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as an “intelligence aggregator” that brings together information related to searches and seizures. For fingerprint matches, the app uses DHS’s centralized Automated Biometric Identification System, which “holds more than 320 million unique identities and processes more than 400,000 biometric transactions per day,” according to the agency.

A report released by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in September 2024 attempted to call attention to concerns about accuracy, oversight, transparency, discrimination, and access to justice as facial recognition tools have quickly proliferated. Although facial recognition technology is now available to the public through commercially available tools, policies governing the federal government’s use of the technology have lagged behind real-world applications. Currently, there are no comprehensive laws regulating the federal government’s use of facial recognition technology and no constitutional provisions governing its use.

“Face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of known wrongful arrests across the country. Immigration agents relying on this technology to try to identify people on the street is a recipe for disaster,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media. “Congress has never authorized DHS to use face recognition technology in this way, and the agency should shut this dangerous experiment down.“

How DHS facial recognition tech spread to ICE enforcement
Facial recognition technology, originally developed for border crossings, has been expanded to help drive mass deportation efforts.

https://reason.com/2025/06/27/how-dhs-facial-recognition-tech-spread-to-ice-enforcement