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Old 10-21-2006, 07:46 PM   #1
redbull
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Default immigrants and money wiring

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...ck=1&cset=true

Suit: Arizona targets money wired from immigrant communities

By Oscar Avila
Tribune staff reporter
Published October 18, 2006, 9:00 PM CDT

A Burbank truck driver sued Wednesday to block Arizona authorities from seizing large money transfers sent from Illinois and 25 other states targeted because they have significant illegal-immigrant populations.

Arizona officials report that since 2002, they have seized $17 million in a little-known campaign to foil criminal networks that often wire money through Western Union and other firms to help smuggle drugs and illegal immigrants over the border from Mexico.

Wednesday's suit, filed in federal court in Arizona, argues that the seizures are unconstitutional because the dragnet is too broad.

The Burbank man, Javier Torres, said he sent $1,000 via Western Union in March to pay for a car he bought from a friend in suburban Phoenix. When Torres' friend did not get the money, Torres said he contacted Western Union, which passed along his name to Arizona authorities. Soon Torres said he received a call from state investigators, who said he had to prove the transfer was part of a legitimate transaction to get the money back.

Because he could not produce documentation of the auto purchase—he had already resold the car, he said—Torres never recovered the money he wired. He ended up having to pay his friend a second time by mail.

State courts have allowed Arizona Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard's office to stop transfers that come from certain states, exceed a certain amount and are executed by certain companies during a specified period.

Most of the transfers were wired to recipients in Arizona. But until a court stopped the practice recently, Goddard's office had seized some transfers from Illinois and other states to Mexico.

Torres joined two other plaintiffs from California and North Carolina in alleging that the only basis for seizing the wire transfers was that they are $1,000 or more in most cases.

Plaintiffs also say their right to due process has been violated because senders aren't adequately notified how to contest the seizures.

The plaintiffs, all Latino, two of them immigrants, are seeking to make the suit a class-action.

Matthew Piers, one of Torres' attorneys, told reporters that hundreds of Illinois consumers have had their wire transfers seized.

Piers said he is not surprised that Illinois transactions were targeted because the state has an estimated 520,000 undocumented immigrants, the fifth-highest population in the country.

Arizona authorities said their state is the "geographic funnel" for drug runners and immigrant smugglers, known as coyotes. They said wire transfers through firms such as Western Union and MoneyGram are key components of bring illegal immigrants to the Midwest and East Coast.

In a statement released Wednesday, Goddard vowed to continue with the program and warned that the lawsuit could cripple smuggling investigations.

Although a spokeswoman declined to address the lawsuit's allegations directly, Goddard said in his statement: "Every effort has been made to prevent the seizure of any funds from people not involved in human smuggling. We have met with Arizona community organizations to be sure that anyone receiving legitimate money transfers would be able to claim their money."

Spokeswoman Andrea Esquer noted that the office must receive permission from an Arizona state court before executing any warrant. She said the office notifies every recipient that a transfer has been intercepted, and provides a bilingual hot-line to receive information.

But plaintiffs complain that the burden of proof is on them to get their money back. Esquer explained that the money can be retrieved "as long as [consumers] can say that it's a legitimate transaction."

After a period of months, the attorney general's office will petition the courts to take seized money that has gone unclaimed and bring it into the office's general investigative fund, Esquer said.

Piers said the goal of combating smuggling is a worthy one but stressed that it doesn't justify Arizona's approach.

"Those [smuggling] activities should be stopped. Those activities are illegal and visit great suffering on people," Piers said. "But the government in this country must always act within the boundaries of the Constitution."

Anita Ramasastry, a law professor at the University of Washington, said the U.S. government has previously required companies to report certain transactions to specific nations as it tries to intercept criminal money transfers.

Arizona's approach appears novel, she said, because one state's authorities are targeting other U.S. states.

Ramasastry said Arizona officials might be able to defend a broad sweep if they can produce data showing patterns of criminal activity with certain types of transactions. Ramasastry added, however, that Arizona authorities are approaching the issue "backwards" by stopping transactions and then sifting through them to find criminal violations.

Even as Western Union pursues its own lawsuit against Arizona officials, immigrant advocates are seeking more plaintiffs for their lawsuit, which has been organized by the non-profit Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Torres said the experience has left him disillusioned, and he said he will never wire money again. The authorities accused me "of sending the money for drugs or for the coyotes. I never imagined they would say that. I felt like they thought I was a criminal," Torres said.

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Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

 
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