• A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer listens during a briefing, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2025, in Silver Spring, Md (AP)

In an era when the lines between immigration enforcement and financial surveillance are increasingly blurred, Arizona’s Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC) offers a sobering example of how data meant to monitor crime can morph into a tool for mass targeting — and in this case, an insidious extension of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

As revealed in a detailed investigation by The Intercept, TRAC was born under the banner of combating money laundering along the border. But over time, it has quietly transformed into a sprawling surveillance apparatus, enabling US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and hundreds of law enforcement agencies to sift through the financial lives of millions — immigrants and citizens alike — without a warrant, without oversight, and without much public knowledge.

At the heart of TRAC lies an immense database of over 340 million wire transfers — each $500 or more — involving Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. These aren’t just data points. They are lifelines: remittances from workers sending money to family members abroad for housing, medicine, or education. TRAC hoovers up names, addresses, and transactional patterns, creating a digital paper trail that can be weaponized against already vulnerable communities.

What makes this system particularly alarming under President Donald Trump’s current administration is the well-documented shift in ICE’s priorities — from targeting serious criminal activity to executing sweeping deportation operations.

According to The Intercept, TRAC’s built-in safeguards, such as the requirement for agents to cite a “predicate offense” before accessing the database, appear more symbolic than substantive. Legal experts and civil liberties advocates warn that these protocols are easily circumvented, with some ICE agents reportedly fabricating justifications to tap into sensitive financial records. In fact, The Intercept reports that ICE was even awarded by the Trump White House for dramatically expanding TRAC’s reach through dubious subpoena practices, granting the agency access to millions of additional wire transfers.

Trump's data-driven deportation machine threatens civil liberties

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat who ran on a platform critical of Trump’s immigration policies, has nonetheless fiercely defended the database — even intervening in federal court to protect TRAC from legal scrutiny. Her office claims the system is essential for combating cross-border crime, yet it has refused to release updated governance documents, board minutes, or current subpoenas to the public, citing legal technicalities that transparency advocates call “borderline frivolous".

This isn’t just about Arizona. What’s unfolding is a national test case for how states can exploit loosely regulated administrative subpoenas to bypass judicial oversight and create shadow databases with federal collaboration. TRAC began with a single subpoena in 2006 and ballooned into a sprawling nonprofit surveillance entity powered by private wire-transfer firms like Western Union and backed at times by ICE funding and board appointments. It now serves nearly 700 agencies and 11,600 users nationwide, according to The Intercept.

As privacy advocates have warned, under President Donald Trump’s policies, it’s easy to envision a dystopian outcome: people targeted, investigated, and deported simply for sending a wire transfer to support family — or, even more alarmingly, due to database errors or abuses carried out without oversight.

Under the guise of stopping drug cartels and money laundering, the Trump administration has effectively built a financial surveillance regime that disproportionately targets poor and immigrant communities. And if left unchecked, it risks normalizing a future in which your bank transfer is a ticket to investigation — or deportation.