Arizona attorney general defends money-transfer surveillance program after announcing 4.5M fentanyl pills seized
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Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of this article misspelled Gary Restaino's name.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes defended a controversial surveillance program that tracks wire transfers at a news conference in Tempe on Thursday afternoon after lauding fellow law enforcement agencies for seizing numerous narcotics as part of a three-year drug bust operation.
Mayes was flanked by Interim Tempe police Chief Josie Montenegro and DEA Special Agent in Charge Cheri Oz as they stood before countless bags of illegal narcotics — among them over 4.5 million fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills — and dozens of firearms seized over the course of a three-year interagency operation.
Oz said the seized drugs were largely produced and distributed by the Sinaloa Cartel, claiming it was responsible for nearly every deadly narcotic entering Arizona.
During the news conference, Mayes did not specify if or how the surveillance program, known as TRAC, was used in this operation but defended its use.
“I have defended the TRAC program that allows us to surveil and know and understand how these cartels are transferring money associated with these drugs back across to Mexico,” Mayes said. “The ACLU has criticized me for that and has criticized TRAC, but we need to be disrupting their money sources and we also need to be disrupting these drugs before they get to our families.”
A spokesperson for the attorney general's office declined to offer additional details as to how the surveillance program was used in this operation.
Mayes' office came under scrutiny last month after the American Civil Liberties Union published over 200 documents it had obtained that showed the agency had collected at least 145 million records of money transfers in amounts above $500 that were sent to and from the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.
The money-transfer records came from a database maintained by the Transaction Record Analysis Center — or TRAC — a Phoenix-based nonprofit established in 2014 as part of a $100 million settlement between the Arizona Attorney General and wire transfer company Western Union over money laundering claims.
Documents the ACLU obtained showed that 28 wire transfer companies, including some of the most popular services like Western Union and MoneyGram, have provided transfer records to the database, which are accessible to about 440 local, 80 state and 53 federal law enforcement agencies, plus 152 field offices under federal agencies.
In a meeting with The Arizona Republic's editorial board in February, Gary Restaino, U.S. Attorney for Arizona, also defended the program and described it as a necessary tool to trace drug money but acknowledged it needed to be used "fairly."
"We’re not looking for whether the person is sending money lawfully from the United States or not," Restaino said. "That’s not the concern. The concern is just to find sources of dirty money in order to trace it to networks."
Nathan Freed Wessler, the deputy director of the Speech Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, has criticized the program as a massive breach of privacy.
“It's really pretty staggering how large and extensive and illegal this program has become,” Wessler said last month. “Thousands of law enforcement officers from more than 700 police agencies and other law enforcement officers around the country have been given free login access to that system without any judicial supervision.”
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office under Mark Brnovich filed about 140 administrative subpoenas between 2014 and 2021 to compel these companies to provide the transfer records, the documents showed. For all subpoena requests, an Arizona judge first had to sign off for them to take effect.
Operation leads to seizure of millions of fentanyl pills
Over 150 people were arrested over the course of the operation, though Montenegro declined to release their names, saying the operation remained ongoing.
“None of (the people arrested) are high up in the cartel,” Montenegro said. “They’re usually lower-level members that are working for the cartel. But the communication stems and so it is related back to the cartel but we do have lower-level members that are committing this crime here in our state.
Montenegro said the majority of seizures were traffic stops, with one of the largest seizures involving 1.5 million fentanyl-laced pills in a single vehicle.
Over the three-year period, the agencies seized:
Over 4.5 million fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills.
66 kilograms of fentanyl powder.
138 kilograms of cocaine.
3,100 pounds of methamphetamine.
35 kilograms of heroin.
49 firearms.
Over $2 million.
Reach the reporter Perry Vandell at 602-444-2474 or perry.vandell@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @PerryVandell.
Republic reporter Rafael Carranza contributed to this article.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona attorney general applauds fentanyl seizure
