On December 3, 2025, the Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, ruled in favor of the Clinic’s client, The Intercept, denying two Motions to Dismiss. The ruling allows a public records suit seeking access to government surveillance records, brought by the Clinic and co-counsel Zwillinger Wulkan in June 2025, to proceed. News outlet The Intercept brought the special action against Arizona’s Attorney General’s Office (AGO) and the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), a nonprofit the AGO established in 2014, seeking access to records from a database that houses millions of wire transfers sent between Mexico and U.S. border states.
The complaint alleges that the AGO created TRAC in 2014 to perform a public function and exerted a high degree of control over TRAC in the decade since, and therefore, the records that The Intercept seeks must be released by the AGO and TRAC to fulfill their transparency obligations under the Arizona Public Records Law.
In October 2025, alumnus Alexander Venditti argued on behalf of The Intercept in opposition to the defendants’ Motions to Dismiss. In December 2025, the court denied the Motions to Dismiss. The court ruled that the TRAC Defendants are subject to the Public Records Law as “[t]he allegations clearly raise a reasonable inference that the TRAC Defendants are performing core governmental functions as the AGO direction and its agent.” The court rejected the AGO’s argument that disclosure of the requested records would violate the confidentiality provisions of Arizona’s anti-racketeering statutes, and found that the AGO failed to meet its burden to demonstrate that the State’s interest in withholding outweighed the public’s right to inspection.
Thanks to our co-counsel at Zwillinger Wulkan, alumni Alexander Venditti and Yifei Yang, students Kyland Carreon, Zachary Jacobson, John Lauro, and Danielle Mimeles, and extern Nyssa Kruse for their work on the suit. Read more about the suit in The Intercept here.