Experts say it’s the first time they know of that money transfer records have been used to trace someone purely for reentering the U.S. illegally, in this case 17 years ago.

He lived quietly with his fiancée, tended to his tile and counter business, coached an adult soccer team until he suffered a leg injury. And when Gregorio Cordova Murrieta went to a MoneyGram in Pearl City to send cash to his family in Mexico — one of millions of people across the United States who regularly make similar transactions — he never imagined it would one day upend the life he’d built in Hawaiʻi.

But federal immigration agents have access, in part through an obscure database run by an Arizona nonprofit, to records of millions upon millions of money transfers made in the U.S., including names, addresses and

See Full Page