by WorldTribune Staff, September 24, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
Mexico’s criminal cartels have been “placed on the defensive” as the Trump Administration moves to cut off their profit streams, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
In 2023 and 2024, during the Biden-Harris open border era, FinCEN, formally known as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, found more than 67,000 suspicious transactions linked to suspected human smuggling in which the cartels raked in more than $5 billion.
Under Biden-Harris there was an average of more than 7,000 such reports each quarter.
By the last half of 2025, when President Donald Trump’s policies had fully kicked in, fewer than 2,000 reports were flagged each quarter, Bessent said.
“The Trump administration is restoring border security and disrupting transnational criminal organizations to keep America safe,” he said as he announced the FinCEN study on social media last month.
Immigrants have been known to pay up to $20,000 to be smuggled into the U.S., with the cartels taking a large cut.
The financial data probed by FinCEN looked at transactions that were outside of financial institution customers’ usual patterns, where money was sent to locations along common migrant routes, or where there weren’t verifiable connections between the sender and receiver.
Suspicious activity reports were tallied in every state. Texas and California led the way, though New York and Florida — popular destinations for illegals — ranked third and fourth.
In some of the reports, the customers even admitted to the financial institutions that they were paying to smuggle a friend or relative, FinCEN said.
Under Trump, as of August, Homeland Security went 15 straight months without a single catch-and-release by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. By contrast, the Biden-Harris regime had months in 2023 that regularly topped 100,000 catch-and-releases.
Trump said in a Sept. 15 presidential determination sent to Congress:
My Administration has made historic progress in protecting the American people from deadly drugs and vicious narcoterrorist organizations. Under my Administration, our southern border is the most sealed and secure in American history, thanks to the largest investments in border security and law enforcement in our Nation’s history. After four years of open border chaos, seizures of fentanyl and other drugs being smuggled into the United States have been reduced by more than half, and drug overdose deaths have plunged. My Administration has saved tens of thousands of American lives from this scourge.
The narcoterrorists responsible for this invasion are either dead, in jail, or living in fear knowing they will be next to face American justice. I have unleashed the strongest military in the history of the world to strike narcoterrorists wherever they threaten our country. Behind the might of the American military, my Administration has destroyed cartel infrastructure, shut down former trafficking highways across sea and land borders, and captured and killed hundreds of the most vicious narcoterrorists.
Under the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, an alliance with over a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere, we have achieved historic results, drastically reducing United States-bound drug flows and seizing billions of dollars of illicit cartel finances. United States law enforcement agencies are reporting record drug seizures, and our allies are extraditing more cartel bosses to the United States than ever before. We have inflicted unprecedented losses on our enemies, and we are just getting started.
If Customs and Border Protection (CBP) keeps up its pace of apprehensions for the final two months of fiscal year 2026, it would demolish the previous record low, set in fiscal year 2025, of about 237,000. In fiscal year 2024, under Biden-Harris, that figure was more than 1.5 million.
“These results show what is possible when border security is treated as a national priority,” said Rodney Scott, CBP’s commissioner.
Mark Morgan, who ran CBP in the first Trump Administration, noted: “The directives, policies, and clear-eyed mandates coming from the White House itself, such as the goal to end catch and release, have allowed those with the mission to safeguard our country’s borders, to unleash their full capacity to get the job done.”
Morgan added, however, that the president’s improvements at the border haven’t been matched by success in the interior, where he said the mass deportation campaign is stumbling.
He said the focus on the “worst of the worst” — migrants with criminal entanglements — has left too many unauthorized immigrants safe from any real fear of catch and removal.
“They need to stop using the ‘criminals are our priority’ as a cloak for nonenforcement of millions of nonviolent offender illegal aliens,” Morgan said.
“Regardless of how secure our borders are, if those wanting to enter our country illegally believe, that as long as they don’t commit another crime while in the U.S., not only will they not be the target of removal, but many, including Republicans, will support their amnesty, illegal immigration will never end.”
