Last April, the Trump administration unveiled its latest measure against Mexican cartels: a strict crackdown on money transfers near the US-Mexico border. The new policy, issued through the Treasury Department’s financial crimes enforcement network (FinCen), required any business offering financial services in the region to report cash transactions exceeding $200 — a dramatic drop from the previous $10,000 threshold. Officials said the change was designed to disrupt money laundering and other illicit financial flows tied to organized crime.
But business owners and legal experts say the policy has backfired, devastating small mom-and-pop operations and the largely immigrant communities that depend on them. One such business is Nachita’s, a family-run grocery store in one of El Paso’s oldest neighborhoods that also offers small-scale financial services. Owner Evangelina Ornelas described the store as a community lifeline for generations. In a working-class area near the border, where many residents lack bank accounts, services like hers are vital: people regularly walked in to pay bills, purchase money orders for rent, and wire money to relatives in Mexico. The accompanying kitchen and grocery aisles also benefited from the foot traffic. “People would come in to do a money transfer, and while they were here they’d get a burrito or purchase grocery items,” she recalled.
The rule upended that routine. Ornelas was suddenly required to report every transaction above $200, along with customers’ addresses, social security numbers, and other identifying details. Many clients grew uneasy, fearing government surveillance or potential targeting by immigration authorities amid heightened enforcement. Elderly customers with limited mobility could no longer pay bills, renters struggled to obtain money orders, and the long lines of immigrants sending money home have all but vanished. “I don’t think it was to prevent money laundering,” Ornelas said. “It didn’t look like it from what I was seeing. I was seeing a lot of people who were just not able to pay their bills or not able to send money to their families.”
Casas de cambio — money-service businesses long embedded in border communities — have been an integral part of the regional financial ecosystem. They operate both as dedicated storefronts and within grocery stores like Nachita’s, often as independent businesses or agents for giants such as Western Union and MoneyGram. Residents, tourists, and the unbanked rely on them for everyday transactions. The new FinCen policy, however, has drawn sharp criticism from privacy and legal experts and prompted lawsuits calling it arbitrary, unjustifiable, and a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. In September 2025, the reporting threshold was raised to $1,000, but small business owners say even that remains burdensome.
Rob Johnson, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which sued the administration alongside the Texas Association of Money Services Businesses, said the higher threshold is still deeply problematic. “$200 is the equivalent of a grocery cart, but $1,000 is the equivalent of a monthly rent payment,” he said. “And either way, you’re talking about an amount of money that is an ordinary, normal amount of money for an ordinary person to be using.” The heightened surveillance has also raised alarm about government overreach that disproportionately targets neighborhoods with large Mexican-American populations. Esperanza Gómez, who runs a money-service business in San Diego, called the measure deeply unfair. “It’s really an unfair measure,” she said. “And on top of that, it’s going to put us out of business.”
For Ornelas, the regulations — carrying the threat of heavy fines even for inadvertent errors — left her buried in paperwork and increasingly frustrated as customers, unwilling or unable to provide social security numbers or other documents, stopped coming. By the time the threshold was raised to $1,000, the money-services side of her business was effectively dead. The broader stakes are considerable: remittances from immigrants are a lifeline for households worldwide, with Mexico alone the top recipient of US remittances, receiving more than $60bn annually from 2023 to 2025. The Trump administration has long viewed these cash flows as a loophole for undocumented workers sending earnings home. In July 2025, President Trump signed sweeping legislation that included a 1% tax on international money transfers, further squeezing the system that border communities have long relied upon.