President Donald Trump has made securing America’s borders a defining priority of his administration — and it’s working. But the cartels adapt in real time, and one of their most powerful tools isn’t a tunnel under the border. It’s a smartphone and a crypto wallet.
As a retired police officer in southern Arizona, I’ve seen firsthand how quickly criminals exploit gaps in the system. Right now, one of the most consequential gaps isn’t at our southern border. It’s in our financial laws.
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Cryptocurrency platforms must play by the same rules as every bank in America.
CRYPTO CLARITY: TIME FOR WASHINGTON TO TAKE THE FUTURE OF MONEY SERIOUSLY
The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 exists for one clear reason: to keep criminals out of our financial system. There is simply no justification for a carve-out that allows digital asset exchanges, brokers, and custodians to operate in the shadows. If a local community bank must track and report dirty money, a massive crypto platform should be held to exactly the same standard.
The cartels have already figured this out. In 2023, the Treasury Department sanctioned Mario Jimenez Castro for laundering fentanyl profits for the Sinaloa Cartel’s Chapitos faction through crypto transactions spanning New York, Boston, Denver, Nashville, Omaha, and Salt Lake City. Last July, federal agents seized a record $10 million in Sinaloa Cartel cryptocurrency in a single Miami operation. A recent federal indictment in the Southern District of Ohio charged Chinese chemical suppliers with shipping fentanyl precursors to the Cartel del Golfo, a designated foreign terrorist organization, with the entire payment chain running through cryptocurrency wallets.
The cost of inaction extends well beyond the border. We have already seen ransomware attacks force local hospitals to shut their doors forever.
In June 2023, St. Margaret’s Health in Spring Valley, Illinois, became the first U.S. hospital to publicly link its permanent closure to a ransomware attack. A 120-year-old institution is gone after criminals paid in crypto held its billing systems hostage for months. In February 2024, the Change Healthcare attack exposed the data of roughly one-third of Americans and ended with a $22 million Bitcoin ransom payment. This February, the University of Mississippi Medical Center was forced to shut down all 35 of its clinics statewide after another ransomware hit.
Violent crimes targeting ordinary Americans are rising as well. “Wrench attacks,” which are kidnappings and home invasions aimed at forcing victims to hand over their private keys, rose 75% globally in 2025, according to CertiK. Last May, an Italian tourist was held for 17 days in a Manhattan townhouse and tortured until he surrendered his wallet. The United States has recorded 48 confirmed crypto-related kidnappings since 2019. The gaps in our crypto anti-money laundering framework are not abstract compliance problems. They are an open door for cartels, terrorists, and organized crime networks that my former colleagues face every day.
Congress must finish the job. Lawmakers took a meaningful first step with the GENIUS Act of 2025, but the current crypto market structure legislation still leaves dangerous loopholes, particularly around decentralized finance platforms and key intermediaries.
WHILE CONGRESS BALKS AT CRYPTO REGULATION, OUR ADVERSARIES PUSH FOR MARKET DOMINANCE
Congress should not pass a bill that fails to address these blind spots. As national law enforcement groups have warned, doing so will make our jobs much harder, and holding criminals accountable will become increasingly impossible.
Trump has shown the will to confront threats that previous administrations ignored. Closing the crypto loophole is the logical next step. Make everyone follow the same rules, give law enforcement the tools we need, and ensure that the cartels we’re pushing back at the border can’t simply move their money online instead.
Jobe Dickinson is President of the Border Security Alliance.
