EXCLUSIVE: Treasury Official Lays Out How Trump Is Choking Off Cash Flow To Cartels

The Trump administration has tapped the Treasury Department to track down and halt the flow of money to foreign drug cartels.

Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Michael Faulkender says the federal agency is choking off the cash flow that powers cartels’ human and drug smuggling operations by designating them as terrorists, he explained to The Daily Wire.

“One of the most important things that the president did upon coming into office was to declare a number of the narco groups terrorist organizations,” Faulkender told The Daily Wire. “What that does is it unleashes additional authorities at Treasury for us to better target some of the financial activities that these cartels are engaging in.”

Faulkender told The Daily Wire that the agency’s moves are cutting into the cartels’ flow of money, disincentivizing their human smuggling and drug-running operations.

“It’s one thing to have our partners at [the Department of Homeland Security] work on stopping the flow of people and drugs, but we can also use our financial tools to go after the money,” the Treasury official explained. “If the money is not flowing back south, then there’s less of an incentive to bring the drugs and the guns and some of the illicit activity up to the north.”

“Since the president took office, we’ve engaged in five different actions going after nine different entities for a total of 16 individuals,” he noted.

The Treasury Department unveiled sanctions on “two high-ranking members of the Mexico-based Cartel del Noreste,” a foreign terrorist organization formerly known as Los Zetas.

Cartel del Noreste “and its leaders have carried out a violent campaign of intimidation, kidnapping, and terrorism, threatening communities on both sides of our southern border,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent charged. “We will continue to cut off the cartels’ ability to obtain the drugs, money, and guns that enable their violent activities.”

That move follows the Treasury Department’s March announcement that it was imposing sanctions on six individuals and seven organizations believed to be laundering money for the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the world’s most notorious criminal organizations and a federally-designated foreign terror organization.

“We leveled sanctions against six individuals and seven entities involved in a money laundering operation, cutting off financing for these evil people,” Bessent said at the time. “Laundered drug money is the lifeblood of the Sinaloa Cartel’s narco-terrorist enterprise, only made possible through trusted financial facilitators like those we have designated today.”

Treasury also hit Brink’s Global Services, which specializes in transporting funds and other valuables for banks and other clients, with a $37 million civil penalty, alleging that the company moved money across the southern border without following anti-money laundering regulations. The company’s violations, the Treasury Department says, exposed “the U.S. financial system to a heightened risk of money laundering, including from narcotics trafficking and other illicit activity.”

Faulkender says the Trump administration isn’t just launching a whole-of-government approach to combat the cartels’ drug and human smuggling, but is also pushing the Mexican government to track and penalize the flow of cartel money.

“The president imposed tariffs on the Mexican government and on products that are coming in from Mexico to elicit participation and cooperation from the Mexican government, and so we are seeing the Mexican government willing to work with us to go after these financial networks that are enriching the cartels,” he told The Daily Wire, adding that the government is “monitoring the money flows, tracking it down, either putting a complete stop to it and, and seizing that money, or at the very least, making it a lot more expensive for them to move that money around and try to deter them from engaging in these kinds of actions.”