President Trump signed an executive order this week that takes direct aim at the financial infrastructure illegal aliens have used to embed themselves in American life.

The order, titled “Restoring Integrity to America’s Financial System,” tells Treasury, the CFPB, and federal banking regulators to confront the fraud, credit, and national-security risks created when the financial system is used by people without legal work authorization.

It is a straightforward concept that most Americans probably assumed was already baked into the system.

If someone is not authorized to work in the United States, banks and regulators should not pretend that person carries the same credit and compliance profile as an American citizen or lawful resident.

The White House explained the order this way in its official fact sheet:

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President Trump signed the executive order to protect America’s financial system from illicit activity, strengthen customer identification requirements for financial institutions, and address the credit risks tied to extending financial services to non-work authorized illegal aliens.

The order directs Treasury to issue a formal advisory within 60 days identifying red flags and suspicious activity patterns tied to payroll tax evasion, hidden account ownership, off-the-books wage payments, structuring schemes, labor trafficking, and the use of Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers to open accounts or obtain credit without verified legal presence.

It also directs Treasury and federal financial regulators to look at stronger Bank Secrecy Act due-diligence and customer-identification rules. The CFPB is directed to consider clarifying that potential deportation and loss of wages may affect a borrower’s ability to repay a loan.

The logic behind the order is as much about immigration enforcement as it is about financial security.

When illegal aliens can obtain credit cards, finance vehicles, secure mortgages, and use financial services with weak identity checks, they build a parallel financial life that makes self-deportation less likely and removal harder to enforce.

Just the News highlighted the security side of the order and the criminal networks the White House says are exploiting weak financial controls:

The order cites national-security and public-safety concerns tied to illicit cross-border financial activity. It points to low-dollar cross-border transfers that can be used for terrorist financing, narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, and other illegal activity.

The order also points to financial-trend analyses that uncovered hubs of deadly fentanyl-related financial activity in the United States connected to Mexico-based cartels. It cites an analysis of Chinese money-laundering networks that identified foreign passport holders using U.S.-based accounts to facilitate the laundering of more than $312 billion for criminal organizations.

On the credit side, the administration argues that extending mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and other consumer credit to removable or non-work-authorized borrowers creates a structural ability-to-repay problem. Employers who violate immigration law can also underreport wages, use mismatched or invalid taxpayer IDs, and distort the income data that lenders rely on when underwriting loans.

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One important caveat: industry groups are not describing the order as a universal citizenship check for every account.

America’s Credit Unions said the order directs NCUA and other federal financial regulators to address undocumented immigrants’ interactions with financial institutions, but added that it “does not require universal citizenship collection on existing or new accounts.”

The White House framed the order as part of a broader strategy to remove the magnets that draw illegal immigration in the first place.

If you cannot work legally and cannot use weak financial rules to borrow and build roots here anyway, the incentive to cross the border illegally drops significantly.

Critics will inevitably call this heavy-handed, but the principle is elementary. American financial institutions should not be turned into infrastructure for illegal immigration, labor trafficking, tax evasion, or cartel-linked money movement.

President Trump is closing a loophole that should never have existed in the first place.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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