President Donald Trump signed a new executive order to prevent undocumented immigrants from using the United States banking and financial system, including to send money to their families, but experts warn that, in addition to being “cruel,” this decision will affect the American financial system.

Trump's order directs the Treasury Department to have a proposal for new regulations within 60 days and, within 90 days at most, to begin applying it.

“If regulators implement this ill-conceived executive order, it will radically destabilize the American financial system and force [people into] withdrawal from banking on an unprecedented scale,” said Diane Thompson, deputy director and chief of the consumer advocacy office at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC).

Thompson even pointed out that this not only represents an attack on immigrants, but also on the US banking system.

“Forcing people to keep their money under their mattress, instead of using a bank, represents a new attack on the financial system and immigrant communities,” he added.

In the same official position of the NCLC, the organization's main lawyer Carla Sánchez-Adams described it as “cruelty” to try to prevent immigrants from sending money to their families.

“Eliminating the ability for immigrants to have secure bank accounts and send money to family members in need is wrong and cruel,” he declared. “This administration has focused on excluding certain individuals from banking, yet this executive order seeks to systematically exclude millions of people from their bank accounts based on suspicion and stereotypes.”

The CATO Institute charged that President Trump establishes a new order that could be violating the Constitution.

“The Bank Secrecy Act is one of the biggest attacks on the Fourth Amendment, and yet he has chosen to expand it with his latest executive order,” indicates an article by Nicholas Antony, a financial expert at the organization. "We've seen this strategy before. The war on drugs and the war on terrorism were used to create extensive surveillance systems. Now it looks like it's the war on immigration."

In February, Antony and David Bier, an immigration expert at the CATO Institute, warned that the Trump administration was preparing to monitor immigrants' accounts and use the information against them for deportation proceedings.

Now, the order seeks for banks and financial institutions to report to federal authorities any person “suspected” of living without papers in the United States.

“Instead of immediately authorizing banks to act as immigration agents, President Trump ordered the Treasury Department to inform them about the risks of serving undocumented immigrants,” adds Antony. “President Trump went further, stating that banks should begin reporting people they suspect are in the country illegally or engaged in other illicit activities.”

Reports against people “suspected” of being undocumented would be made through suspicious activity reports (SAR) under the Bank Secrecy Act.