What a difference a president makes.
For four years, the borders of the United States of America may as well not have existed. For four years, we watched as illegal aliens flooded in, many being caught by border authorities and then simply released to enter the country. For four years, we watched as illegal drugs were trafficked across the border, including fentanyl, which has an astronomical overdose rate. This has all changed now. The borders, most notably the southern border, are under control. The flood of drugs and trafficked people has slowed. The cartels who traffic both drugs and people are getting hit hard, in that they have lost a lot of people, in particular the crews of drug-running boats.
Now, all this is also hitting the cartels where it really hurts: In their wallets.
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.
$5 billion is a lot of money (what is that in pesos?), but there's one important point to make here:
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 cartels are feeling the pinch, then. That's good.
Earlier on Friday, RedState's own Teri Christoph brought us related news, namely that deaths from fentanyl overdoses have dropped dramatically under the Trump administration. Teri writes:
According to new numbers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) being highlighted by the Trump White House – it's National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day – deaths from synthetic opioids, which includes fentanyl, plunged 22 percent, down from 48,913 in 2024 (Biden) to 38,084 in 2025 (Trump).
There's even more good news: drug overdose deaths overall also fell sharply, dropping 14 percent from 81,313 to 69,973.
In other words, people are alive today who may not have been, had the 2024 presidential election gone the other way. It's as simple as that. Enforcing the border works. Stopping illegal aliens works. "Kinetic strikes" (blowing up) on drug smuggling boats work. Arresting illegal alien criminals in the United States and sending them back to wherever they came from works, although it would be great for the administration to press the TURBO button on that part of it.
It's rather intuitive, but yes, enforcement works. The only catch here is that the cartels are still sitting on considerable resources and they still have their tentacles deep into the government and military branches of the governments of places like Mexico and Venezuela; so, this job is far from over. But these are nevertheless great indicators. The cartels are getting hit in their bankbooks, and that's what we call a good start.
It's the southern border, though, that's the real issue. Under the Biden administration, thousands, even millions, flooded across that border, drawn by the well-known lack of enforcement of our immigration laws. Even if an illegal immigrant was caught, all they had to do was utter a few well-rehearsed lines about being an asylum seeker, and they were allowed to remain in the United States. Thousands flooded into hazardous desert routes, and many died. Thousands of children came in, unaccompanied, trafficked by the cartels and smaller operators, and we still don't know what became of a lot of those kids. Thousands of women suffered sexual assault at the hands of the traffickers, as part of the price to move north.
The Biden administration allowed all this to happen. It's not happening now.
And, yes, this is what we voted for. Remember that in November.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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