Javier Torres, a truck driver from Burbank, Ill., a Chicago suburb, bought a car for $1,000 from a friend in Glendale, Ariz., wiring the money to him via Western Union. The money never arrived. The transfer was seized by the Arizona attorney general’s office. Millions of additional dollars in transfers, mainly to and from immigrants in the United States, have been seized.
Torres resold the car a short time later. Since it was only briefly in his possession, he never registered the car in his
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On Oct. 18, Torres, along with Alma Santiago, of Charlotte, N.C., and Lia Rivadeneyra of Daly City, Calif., sued the Arizona attorney general’s office. The plaintiffs have asked a federal judge to certify the suit as a class action.
State attorney general Terry Goddard is named as a defendant for his racial profiling of immigrants in the seizure of wired funds to Arizona. This practice is supposedly part of a state campaign to prevent payments to drug traffickers and “coyotes”—guides who charge immigrants to assist them in crossing the Mexican border.
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights gathered information over the last year to assist the plaintiffs in putting together the federal lawsuit.
More than $18 million has been seized from transactions originating in as many as 28 states, according to Joshua Hoyt, the executive director of the coalition. The lawsuit is asking the court for an injunction on seizures and for the return of seized transfers and subsequent legal fees to plaintiffs.
“We have interviewed over 400 senders, and we have learned that this has been done with no specific proof against either the sender or the receiver but with a presumption of guilt and with absolutely no notice to the senders of their legal rights to get the money back,” explained Hoyt.
The federal government knows about tens of billions of dollars that are laundered through big U.S. banks like Citibank and Bank of America; big banks, however, are not targets in the state attorney office’s campaign. Real restrictions curtailing drug money laundering would cut deeply into banks’ profits, so the attorney general chose a racist anti-immigrant campaign instead.
The coalition is seeking more plaintiffs in this class action suit. Western Union is pursuing it own lawsuit against the Arizona attorney general’s office.
