Border Residents Face New Financial Scrutiny, With $200 Transactions To Be Flagged and Reported as Possible Money Laundering

Residents along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas or California could soon be at risk of being accused of laundering money for drug cartels for conducting bank transactions as small as $200.The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has announced a new Geographic Targeting Order to crack down on questionable cash transactions made across seven counties in both states by lowering the threshold for banks to file Currency Transaction Reports to as little as two hundred bucks from the usual $10,000.The new order was created “to further combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border,” the agency says, and takes effect on April 11.“Today’s issuance of this GTO underscores our deep concern with the significant risk to the U.S. financial system of the cartels, drug traffickers, and other criminal actors along the Southwest border,” the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said in a FinCEN statement announcing the order. “As part of a whole-of-government approach to combatting the threat, Treasury remains focused on leveraging all our available tools and authorities to better identify and counter these criminal activities.”The initiative comes as a result of an executive order issued by President Trump in January which designated certain cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and listed six major Mexico-based drug cartels as terror groups in order to prevent their members from gaining access to the American financial system.The order increasing the threshold for transactions that must be reported covers 30 zip codes across Cameron, El Paso, Hidalgo, Maverick, and Webb counties in Texas and San Diego and Imperial counties in California. It will remain in place for at least 180 days.According to federal law, banks and other businesses like check cashing and currency exchange services across the country report transactions totaling at least $10,000 per day, including deposits and withdrawals. While ATMs often have lower withdrawal limits that leaves them unlikely to trigger such reports, they technically fall under the order’s purview.The new threshold across the seven border counties has some critics calling them move the “wrong direction” for reform.“More than one million Americans are about to face a new level of financial surveillance,” a Cato Institute policy analyst, Nicholas Anthony, wrote in a recent analysis. “Financial surveillance in the United States has long needed reform, but this move is in the wrong direction.”

Border Residents Face New Financial Scrutiny, With $200 Transactions To Be Flagged and Reported as Possible Money Laundering

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