Trump signs executive order treating immigration status as a financial-risk factor

On May 19, 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Integrity to America's Financial System," directing the Treasury Department and federal bank regulators to treat a customer's immigration status as a factor in assessing financial risk. The order instructs the Secretary of the Treasury to issue, within 60 days, a formal advisory describing "red flags" associated with "non-work authorized populations and their employers" -- among them the use of an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) to open a deposit account or obtain credit "where the applicant lacks verified lawful immigration status." It further directs Treasury to propose changes to Bank Secrecy Act regulations that would let institutions collect and verify information bearing on account holders' immigration status and work authorization, and to weigh the risks that foreign consular identification cards pose to the financial system.

The order also instructs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to consider clarifying that "potential deportation and loss of wages" are factors that could adversely affect a "non-work authorized borrower's ability to repay" credit under the ability-to-repay standards in 12 CFR Part 1026, and tells each federal financial regulator to issue guidance on the credit risks of lending to people without work authorization. The White House framed the measure as anti-money-laundering and "safety and soundness" risk management, stating that the administration would not "permit risks to our financial system posed by the extension of credit or financial services to the inadmissible and removable alien population." The order stops short of an earlier-reported plan -- which the banking industry had lobbied against -- that would have made the collection of customers' citizenship information mandatory.

The operative effect of the order singles out immigration status: it directs surveillance-style advisories around ITIN use and foreign consular identification and treats deportation risk as an underwriting negative for noncitizen borrowers. Kathryn Judge, a law professor at Columbia Law School, told Newsweek that the order, if implemented aggressively, could "affect almost anyone with a bank account" and "may have the effect of scaring people away from accessing bank services." The measure follows other administration actions -- including the November 2025 reclassification of certain refundable tax credits as "federal public benefits" -- that discourage noncitizens from participating in the formal financial system. The Standing records the order as a discriminatory policy that disadvantages people on the basis of immigration status, a characteristic closely tied to national origin, and as government scrutiny aimed at a marginalized community, consistent with its broken-windows approach of documenting such actions as part of an accumulating pattern.