Court records confirm what civil liberties advocates long warned would happen: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using sensitive data about wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico to track down immigrants for deportation.
The records were filed in a federal criminal case in Hawaii, as first reported by Honolulu Civil Beat earlier this week.
Gregorio Cordova Murrieta, who is originally from Mexico, was not indicted for money laundering, human trafficking, or any of the grave offenses that law enforcement officials typically offer to justify financial surveillance of wire transfers.
Instead, he was indicted in early July on a single count of reentering the country without authorization after having been previously deported to Mexico. This was the sole basis for the arrest warrant submitted by a special agent with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, which once marketed itself as hunting down war criminals and drug smugglers but under the current Trump administration has shifted resources toward tracking down undocumented people and critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In a filing to a federal magistrate judge on June 25, HSI Special Agent Tabitha Hanson explained how she found Cordova Murrieta using financial surveillance data.
Using “information from a money remittance company,” Hanson identified 11 instances when Cordova Murrieta sent “individual remittances to individuals located in Mexico” October 2021 and May 2025. The financial data included an address in ‘Aiea, near Honolulu, where ICE agents surveilled Cordova Murrieta in mid-June and later arrested him on June 26.
It is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions — like sending money to loved ones — into grounds for immigration enforcement.
“It is disheartening to see ICE and HSI resorting to surveillance tactics that turn routine, lawful actions — like sending money to loved ones — into grounds for immigration enforcement,” said Salmah Y. Rizvi, executive director of the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, in an emailed statement. “Hawaii’s large immigrant community relies on remittances to support families abroad, and this kind of government overreach creates a chilling effect, making people feel unsafe even doing everyday tasks.”
Jacquelyn Esser, a federal public defender representing Cordova Murrieta, said his was the only case she had seen in which ICE targeted an individual for deportation using remittance data.
