Trump-Era Financial Surveillance Aims to Track Small Transactions
Cato Daily Podcast
Caleb Brown
4.6 • 949 Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, March 25th, 2025. |
| 0:08.8 | I'm Caleb Brown. |
| 0:09.9 | In pursuit of their immigration crackdown, the Trump administration wants to use financial surveillance, |
| 0:15.4 | specifically for those sending small dollar amounts across borders. |
| 0:19.4 | Cato's Nick Anthony says it's another attack on Americans' financial privacy. |
| 0:27.0 | Nick, you and I have discussed several times the issues surrounding financial surveillance. |
| 0:34.7 | They go back to at least the 1970s. I'm deep in the middle of Patrick Eddington's |
| 0:41.5 | book, The Triumph of Fear, and some financial surveillance goes back much further. But the financial |
| 0:49.2 | surveillance that we got in the 70s, that was supercharged by the Patriot Act and attempted to be supercharged |
| 0:58.5 | again in the Biden administration in terms of lowering the threshold for routine surveillance |
| 1:05.6 | of Americans' financial transactions. The Trump administration has been good in some areas when it comes to |
| 1:15.4 | financial surveillance, but here it seems that, at least from my initial look at it, they're |
| 1:23.5 | testing financial surveillance to see how useful it is for law enforcement relating to |
| 1:32.2 | immigration or specifically groups that they don't like in the United States. Is that about right? |
| 1:39.3 | Yeah, that's really what we're seeing with what's going on at the southern border right now. |
| 1:45.8 | Just the other day, the Treasury announced that it was going to increase surveillance. |
| 1:51.3 | So we've talked about this probably dozens of times now that anything above $10,000 |
| 1:57.2 | is getting reported to the government. |
| 1:59.3 | There was some 20 million plus reports last year on that alone for just transferring more than $10,000. Nothing criminal about that. But down at the border, they're lowering that threshold to just $200 for money service businesses. So that's like Western Union, Ria Transfer, Casa |
| 2:21.7 | de Cambrio, and the like, folks that are, or rather businesses that are sending money across borders |
| 2:28.5 | to friends and family or exchanging currency. Say you come back from a trip to Mexico and you want to exchange your |
| 2:36.6 | leftover pesos, if you do more than $200 worth, you're now on a government watch list. |
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