For years, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes defended the Transaction Record Analysis Center, a secretive financial surveillance program that tracks wire transfers between the U.S. and Mexico sent via Western Union and other companies. As recently as April, in response to The Intercept’s reporting, her office brushed off fears that the Trump administration might use TRAC data to hit its deportation quotas.

“To our understanding there is nothing in the data TRAC collects that provides information on an individual’s immigration status,” said Mayes’s spokesperson, Richie Taylor, in an email in April, “and TRAC data is used exclusively for money laundering investigations.”

But earlier this summer, after The Intercept filed a public records lawsuit for documents about TRAC, Mayes took steps to limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ access to the database, her office disclosed to The Intercept.

As of late June, agents from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, wing have been “de-platformed,” Mayes said in an emailed statement, and her office has “barred usage by agents and officials in these agencies for misuse of the data.”

“I continue to support the use of this data to assist law enforcement in our mission of defeating transnational drug cartels,” Mayes said, “but this data is not and has never been intended to be used for immigration purposes.”

Taylor attributed the change in Mayes’s stance to her increasing concern “about the unconstitutional actions of the Trump administration over the last several months.”

“The Attorney General’s Office is working on additional restrictions to safeguard the use of the data,” Taylor said. “And if there are any additional instances of misuse of the data, Attorney General Mayes is prepared to deplatform and ban additional agencies from using the database.”

Mayes’s office acknowledged the shift in policy in response to questions from The Intercept about two instances this year in which agents from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s intelligence wing, used TRAC data to locate noncitizens for deportation who were not accused of any crime aside from unauthorized presence in the country. In recent months, thousands of HSI agents have been diverted to support ERO in removal operations.

The American Civil Liberties Union told The Intercept that Mayes was “right to recognize the extraordinary harm that will flow from feeding this highly sensitive and revealing data to the federal government’s indiscriminate mass deportation machine,” but that her belated steps to rein in certain ICE agents’ access were not enough.

“The only way to durably protect our communities is to shut this database down.”

“Cutting off ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents still leaves access for the thousands of agents in ICE Homeland Security Investigations who have been unleashed by this administration to pursue civil immigration deportation efforts,” said Nathan........

© The Intercept