Two weeks ago, President Trump instituted broad tariffs using in part the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). At least three lawsuits have been filed targeting his authority to issue tariffs under IEEPA and more may be forthcoming. While tariffs grab all the headlines, the Trump Administration may soon consider using IEEPA for another purpose: limiting personal remittances, which are transfers of money sent by migrants in the United States to family or friends in their home countries. The President’s use of IEEPA to limit personal remittances would be novel, but likely legal.
The Trump Administration has long been interested in remittances. The first Trump Administration limited family remittances to Cuba in 2019 under the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA). (Cuba is the only country to which the President may apply the TWEA outside of a time of war.) In 2023, then-Senator and now-Vice President Vance introduced a bill named the Withholding Illegal Revenue Entering Drug Markets Act to tax all remittances out of the United States at ten percent, intending to tackle illegal migration. Last month, the Administration ordered money transmitters along the southwest border of the United States to file currency reports with the government for transactions over $200, in the hopes of combatting drug cartels.
Limiting personal remittances sits at the intersection of two Trump Administration priorities: limiting capital outflows and curbing migration. Remittance payments to Latin America have jumped immensely — by 26.7% in 2021 alone — which is likely a result of the recent explosion in migration to the United States. There are now $160 billion dollars in remittances sent to Latin America and the Caribbean every year, increasingly via businesses with booming valuations that promise low rates and easy processing.
Many migrants enter the United States in order to send remittances to family and friends back home and may voluntarily return to their countries of origin if they were no longer able to do so. And some remittances are used to pay “migrant smugglers,” creating a cycle of migration. Furthermore, personal remittances make up more than a quarter of some Latin American countries’ gross domestic product, so the threat of limits are a useful negotiating tool in the hands of the President.
Limiting personal remittances to countries from which the United States received high levels of illegal migration would thus serve President Trump’s agenda. A plan might look like his 2019 executive order to limit family remittances to Cuba to $1,000 per quarter. Exact dollar-amount ceilings are hard to predict, but the Trump Administration likely would choose country-by-country ceilings low enough to encourage illegal migrants to return to their home countries, but high enough to ensure that resulting hardships in those countries do not rebound on the United States. If it is not logistically overwhelming, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) could issue licenses to those with proof of legal residency who wish to avoid these ceilings.
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Limiting personal remittances under IEEPA is likely legal. The plain text of IEEPA suggests that it may be used to limit personal remittances. First, the President must “declare[] a national emergency” which threatens “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” President Trump has already declared “a national emergency . . . at the southern border.” The declaration of emergency is likely lawful or nonjusticiable. When President Trump declared a similar emergency in his first term, orders by district courts did not probe the lawfulness of the declaration. In fact, “no court has ever reviewed the merits of such a declaration.”
Once an emergency has been declared, “the President may . . . regulate[] or prohibit . . . any transactions in foreign exchange . . . [and] the importing or exporting of currency or securities, by any person or with respect to any property subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” Remittances from the United States to persons in foreign countries involve the “exporting of currency” that is “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” and thus fall squarely within the statute. The statute excepts the President’s ability to limit “donations,” but only of “food, clothing, and medicine,” and also overrides that exception if the President finds it “would seriously impair his ability to deal with any national emergency.”
Currently, regulations pursuant to IEEPA prohibit many types of foreign payments to residents of American adversaries such as Iran, but personal remittances are exempted so long as the remittance is handled by a “United States depository institution or a United States registered broker or dealer.” Few cases have dealt with the “personal remittance exemption,” but courts have analyzed the question as a matter of interpretation of the relevant regulations and have not suggested that limiting personal remittances would run afoul of IEEPA.
Because the authorization appears straightforward, potential challengers will need to be creative. Since personal remittances amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, challengers may argue that limiting remittances runs afoul of the “major questions doctrine,” which restricts contested statutory interpretations that give agencies “unheralded regulatory power over a significant portion of the American economy.” However, the Court may be more tolerant in the foreign payments context because Congress “authorize[s] many executive branch actions related to foreign affairs in broad or general terms.” The Supreme Court has long blessed broad authorizations in the related immigration and foreign asset contexts. Furthermore, the major questions doctrine might not apply to presidential action because the President “does not suffer from the same lack of political accountability that agencies may.”
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In sum, President Trump’s use of IEEPA to limit personal remittances may be forthcoming and is likely lawful. Those opposing this measure may wish to attempt difficult challenges in the courts using the major questions doctrine. But successful opposition probably would require Congress to override the President’s emergency powers, and Congress is unlikely to do so.