You don’t often go by your bricks-and-mortar bank branch these days, what with the electronic wonders of direct deposit and the fact that most of your purchases are made on a credit card.
But sometimes you want some cash on hand, for emergencies, or for whatever you want — it’s your money. So you fire up the ATM outside the bank with your debit card and punch in your PIN. Hmmm — is $100 enough? Nah, better make it $200. You make the request, and the machine dutifully delivers the greenbacks.
And then immediately thereafter writes a snitch note to the federal government noting that you have had the audacity to ask for some folding money.
What on earth?
But that’s the plan for you and your resources as backed by the United States Department of the Treasury, if so far just in select counties along the American-Mexican border — very much including San Diego County, as it happens. If Treasury gets its way, every time you take out $200 or more from a bank in one of 30 ZIP Codes in border counties here in California and in Texas, or engage in certain other cash transactions, that will trigger a Currency Transaction Report to the feds.
This is a really, really low threshold for such blatant interference in Americans’ personal financial affairs, and it’s just plain wrong. And it’s yet another intrusive result of a Day 1 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that designated “certain international cartels” as “foreign terrorist organizations,” a classification that according to the State Department “play[s] a critical role in our fight against terrorism and [is] an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business,” according to reporting by Reason magazine.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the change “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.”
“No matter the administration’s intent to target cartels, the rule will expand government surveillance of its citizens,” Reason plainly notes.
On Tuesday, a federal court in San Diego put a temporary halt to the financial surveillance rule, at least for California’s San Diego and Imperial counties, after a group of local businesses teamed up with the Institute for Justice to sue the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) over its extreme new regulations.
The regulations themselves aren’t new. Treasury’s hoped-for edict in its desire to go after drug traffickers is rather an extreme revision to the longstanding reporting requirement throughout the country on cash transactions over $10,000. When a CTR is triggered, banks and other institutions need to record a Social Security or tax ID number for the person getting the cash.
Truthfully, an easy argument can be made that even that amount is way too low. The federal government began requiring reporting of cash transactions of $10,000 or more back in 1952. By that logic, with inflation, the number should be $180,000 today.
The cash-based businesses that correctly sued and achieved this temporary stay include firms that provide check cashing, money transfers and money order services for working class customers, many of whom do not have bank accounts. “This relieves the heavy weight that we were feeling, and this will allow us to continue to work for our customers and our community and will keep our business alive,” said Esperana Gomez, the owner of one such company.
Here’s hoping the temporary stay becomes permanent.