Financial crime investigators at the Treasury Department have identified nearly $5 billion in bank and other transactions tied to suspected human smuggling between 2023 and 2025, a finding that puts a sharp financial number on a long-running border problem. The Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, said it found $4.9 billion in suspicious exchanges while reviewing Bank Secrecy Act data for the period covered by a forthcoming Financial Trend Analysis report.
The suspicious activity included heavy cash movement along the southwest border, transfers tied to other common migration routes, and payments with no clear relationship between the sender and the recipient, according to the report. FinCEN said the transactions showed mismatched payment amounts, unexplained refunds, and contracts that did not match the actual flow of money. Some of the flagged payments also covered more than $3 million in charter flights that investigators believe were linked to human smuggling between the Middle East and Central America.
One case cited in the report involved a filer that connected a company to smuggling incidents, including a charter flight carrying Indian nationals from Egypt to Jamaica through the United Arab Emirates and then to Nicaragua, where the migrants were able to try to enter the United States over land. FinCEN said its analysts reviewed 67,540 Bank Secrecy Act reports in all, with the highest volume of suspicious activity appearing in 2024, when 29,266 reports were recorded.
The number of reports then dropped sharply. Just 11,018 Bank Secrecy Act reports were filed in 2025, a 62% decline from the prior year. The report linked that drop to heightened scrutiny of possible smuggling and trafficking networks, especially with the United States preparing to host the 2026 World Cup. California and Texas generated the most reports in the United States, and Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia followed among the places tied to the activity.
