Nearly $5 billion in suspicious financial transactions tied to human smuggling. That's what the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — FinCEN — tracked between 2023 and 2025. But here's the number that matters: reports of suspected smuggling profits dropped 62% in 2025, the first full year of Trump's border enforcement crackdown.
Sixty-two percent. Not a dip. A collapse.
FinCEN Director Andrea Gacki oversaw the analysis, which reviewed Bank Secrecy Act filings across all three years. In 2023, financial institutions flagged 27,256 suspicious reports connected to human smuggling — roughly 40% of the total filings reviewed. In 2024, that number climbed to 29,266, representing 43% of total reports. Then 2025 happened. Filings cratered to 11,018 — just 16% of the total. The trajectory tells you everything: the money pipeline that fed the cartels' smuggling operations started drying up almost immediately after enforcement got serious.
The financial hemorrhage tracks perfectly with what's happening at the physical border. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed "15 consecutive months of zero releases at the border, continuing the unprecedented trend of historically low border crossings." Daily apprehensions are down 94% compared to the Biden administration. Mullin added that "DHS remains focused on enforcing our immigration laws, securing the border, and ensuring those who enter our country illegally are removed swiftly."
Consider the scale of what we're dismantling. The Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that cartels — particularly the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG — were pulling in roughly $13 billion annually through smuggling operations. The DEA has documented how "CJNG's ruthless ambition to expand its operations has led the organization to deploy kidnappings, torture, bombings, and executions" to protect that revenue stream. This isn't a humanitarian enterprise with a PR problem. It's a multinational criminal syndicate that was printing money under Biden's open-border posture, and its balance sheet just got torched.
Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio put it plainly: "we have the most secure border in history." As Liberty Nation reported, the Treasury data backs that claim with the kind of evidence that's hard to spin — actual financial intelligence showing the cartel business model buckling under enforcement pressure.
The usual objections write themselves. Immigration advocates will point to humanitarian costs, asylum backlogs, the moral complexities of deterrence. Which is an interesting framework to apply to an industry that generates $13 billion a year by trafficking human beings through desert corridors controlled by organizations that specialize in kidnapping and torture. The "compassion" argument gets considerably harder to make when the Treasury Department can show you, in black and white, that the compassionate-sounding policy was underwriting a criminal empire.
What the FinCEN report reveals isn't just a policy success — it's the financial autopsy of a business model. For three years, cartels operated a logistics network that moved people and money across the border at industrial scale. Financial institutions watched the cash flow and filed tens of thousands of suspicious activity reports. Under Biden, those numbers kept climbing. Under Trump, they fell off a cliff. The 94% drop in apprehensions and the 62% drop in smuggling-linked financial activity aren't two separate stories. They're the same story told from two different ledgers.
From 40% of all suspicious filings to 16%. From 29,266 reports to 11,018. From $13 billion in annual cartel revenue to a business model that can't find enough customers to stay solvent.
That's not a policy debate. That's a profit-and-loss statement.
