Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has boasted that a presidential executive order requiring banks to collect citizenship information on all their customers is “in process.”
Bessent made the claim at a dinner hosted by news outlet Semafor in Washington on Monday. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable,” he said. “Why don’t we have information on who’s in our banking system?”
Any such executive order could effectively conscript the financial sector into President Donald Trump’s deportation machine.
The 63-year-old Bessent, who has a net worth of around $600 million, also told the assembled dinner guests, “I have a place in the U.K., they want to know who lives in every apartment—and how do we know that it’s not part of a foreign terrorist organization?”
The Trump administration’s plan to require banks to verify customers’ citizenship was previously reported by Semafor in February.
The plan would require banks to ask customers to present a document, such as a passport or birth certificate, to verify citizenship, in addition to the standard documentation banks already collect: name, date of birth, and verified address.
In the United States, bank customers are currently not required to provide evidence of citizenship to open a bank account.
Citizenship verification is more common in other nations, according to Bloomberg. In the European Union, for example, a national ID card or passport can be used to open a new account.
The publication also noted that there were only 183 million U.S. passports in circulation in 2025, in a country with a population of more than 340 million.
If the executive order were retroactive, banks would be obliged to obtain proof of citizenship from existing customers, as well as new ones.
When news of the plans first emerged, the White House said, “Any reporting about potential policy-making… is baseless speculation.”
Bessent’s fresh claim that the executive order is in the pipeline follows blowback last month from some of the financial industry’s key players.
The Washington Post said Wall Street executives had warned administration officials that the plan would be an unworkable administrative burden.
Jeremy Kress, associate professor of business law at the University of Michigan warned that the plan was “a way to weaponize the banking system to achieve political ends.”
Bloomberg also reported that banking industry groups flagged concerns over the chilling effect on both banks and customers of linking citizenship information to immigration status.
The idea of adding the hurdle of proof of citizenship was labeled a “complete nightmare” by a financial services lobbyist when it was raised in February.
They noted that while the Trump administration would hope it would stop immigrants from accessing banks, it could blow back on their own voting base. “The admin might think this is a good idea until Joe MAGA in Alabama is asked to present his papers,” the lobbyist said.
Following previous reporting on the information mandates for banks in The Wall Street Journal, Republican Senator Tom Cotton made it clear he backed the Trump administration’s tightening of the rules on who could or couldn’t open an account.
In February, Cotton shared a letter that he had posted to Bessent last October, where he noted that the American banking system ”is a privilege that should be reserved for those who respect our laws and sovereignty.”
In his caption on X, Cotton said, “I strongly support President Trump taking action to prevent illegal migrants from accessing our banking system.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the Department of the Treasury for comment.
