‘This development is bad for the Fourth Amendment because it takes away what’s left of peoples’ financial privacy,’ attorney Rob Johnson said.
Americans living near the Mexican border now have to report money transactions of $200 or more to the federal government, following a recent decree from the Treasury Department.
It reduces the reporting threshold from the prior level of $10,000, and no warrant or evidence of a crime is required.
The new rule has raised concerns regarding warrantless surveillance of law-abiding Americans, however.
“This takes a financial surveillance system that is already enormous and intrusive and burdensome, and it expands that system enormously,” Rob Johnson, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, told The Epoch Times.
Banks, payment service providers, and other companies that handle money in these zip codes will be “essentially spying on their own customers and filling out reports on the activities of their customers to file with the federal government,” Johnson said. “It’s going to take away the financial privacy of people who use those businesses.”
The changes were announced on March 11 by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit (FinCEN).
“Today’s issuance of this GTO [Geographic Targeting Order] 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,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
“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.”
According to USA Facts, fentanyl, which is often shipped across America’s southern border, was responsible for more than 250,000 deaths in the United States between 2018 and 2023.
FinCEN’s GTO requires that all money services businesses located in 30 ZIP codes across California and Texas file Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) with FinCEN for transactions of $200 or more in order to “combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border,” FinCEN stated on its website.
As a result of FinCEN’s new order, more than one million Americans will have their transactions caught up in this surveillance net, according to Nicholas Anthony, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.
“Although it’s temporary and limited to the border, this policy marks a massive increase in financial surveillance,” Anthony told The Epoch Times.
“Most Americans believe their financial information is private and protected by the Fourth Amendment,” he said. “What we really have, however, is the illusion of financial privacy.
“The Bank Secrecy Act, the third-party doctrine, and other policies have given the government sweeping insights into our financial lives.”
