President Trump’s stunning success in quelling the southwestern border has had a significant silver lining — he’s managed to starve the smuggling cartels of a source of income, according to a new Treasury Department analysis.
FinCEN, formally known as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, crunched the numbers on bank reports of suspicious transactions linked to suspected human smuggling. They spotted 67,540 reports, totaling nearly $5 billion.
But the vast majority of those occurred in 2023 and 2024, under President Biden, who averaged more than 7,000 reports each quarter.
By the last half of 2025, when Mr. Trump’s policies had fully kicked in, fewer than 2,000 reports were flagged each quarter.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the numbers prove Mr. Trump has put the smugglers “on the defensive.”
“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 week.
Immigrants have been known to pay up to $20,000 to be smuggled into the U.S., with the cartels taking a cut.
The border numbers have been the most resounding success of the Trump administration.
While the numbers had been dipping in the latter months of 2024 as the Biden administration adopted Trump-style get-tough policies, the new administration has all but shut down the southern border to illegal migration.
Homeland Security has now gone 15 straight months without a single catch-and-release by Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. By contrast, the Biden administration had months in 2023 that regularly topped 100,000 catch-and-releases.
The new administration wrangled that achievement by invoking emergency powers to curtail bogus asylum claims and expanding detention capacity so those who do still try to come are held until their cases can be decided.
Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, are bringing charges against a far higher percentage of illegal border crossers, slapping them with criminal records.
The result is that agents are averaging between 6,000 and 10,000 immigrant arrests a month along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
And over the last 12 months, they’ve totaled about 95,000 apprehensions. If Customs and Border Protection keeps up that pace 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 Mr. Biden, 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.
It’s not just the lower numbers. It’s also the mix.
During the worst months of the Biden era, unaccompanied children and children traveling with parents made up half of the flow of people — more than 100,000. They were crossing in remote desert areas, getting lost and injured, or swimming the Rio Grande and, in tragic cases, dying in the attempt.
In 2023, CBP tallied more than 100 rescues a day. So far this year it’s averaging fewer than four daily rescues.
Experts said the methods Mr. Trump is using were well known, and some have been tried before. But what’s different is putting them all together, with the political willpower to see it through.
“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,” said Mark Morgan, who ran CBP in the first Trump administration.
But he added a caution.
“My only criticism is, Republicans need to stop saying the ‘border is secure.’ It’s not. While I agree it’s accurate to say this administration has achieved the most secure border in modern history, a lot more work remains to be done,” he told The Washington Times.
Immigrant rights advocates say the downside of the controlled border is that some truly needy people are being blocked from reaching the U.S.
They have launched court challenges seeking to unwind the asylum restrictions and to challenge construction of border wall.
They’ve had some limited success, but for the most part have been stiff-armed.
Wall building, for example, is heating up. Between the Defense Department and CBP, the administration says it’s erected 171 new miles of fencing or water barriers, and has a staggering 972 miles under construction.
Hundreds more miles are in planning.
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 unauthorized immigrants — 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.
Mr. Morgan said 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,” Mr. 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.”
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