With the support of my subcommittee and the full Appropriations Committee, I added an amendment to the Treasury Transportation Appropriations Bill which halts funding for a rule the Treasury Department adopted authorizing banks to accept a virtually unlimited range of foreign government identification documents from a legal or illegal foreign national to open a bank account. Treasury adopted this rule despite the strenuous objections of the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. Federal law enforcement authorities objected to this rule because it will make it easier for criminals to launder money and hide their true identity. Matricula Consular cards, for example, are used almost exclusively by illegal aliens from Mexico, and they are widely used to create false identities because the Mexican birth certificate on which it is based is so easily forged.

A last minute change to the final Treasury rule even authorizes banks to shred or destroy all photocopies of the identification documents used to open the bank account, so do not believe it when you are told this rule allows banks and Treasury to track potential criminals. The identity on the consular card is probably fake to begin with, and the bank can shred all the records!! This outrageous last minute change was made at the last minute at the request of the banks without any input or comment from federal law enforcement authorities or Congress. The rule is so bad and so wide open that House Judiciary Committee attorneys have concluded that "an Iraqi listed on the '50 Most Wanted List' ...could open a bank account using a ID card printed in Arabic issued in 2001..."

Multiple press accounts have come out this summer confirming what federal authorities had told me and led me to author this amendment - that "terrorists will infiltrate the Southwest border [as] part of an effort to disrupt the national elections in November with other terrorist attack." (Houston Chronicle, Sept. 6, 2004). "Terrorists probing U. S - Mexico border, intelligence suggests. . .U. S. Rep. Jim Turner [said] 'a group of Middle Eastern men' was moving Latin maerica towards the Texas border." (Corpus Christi Caller, September 3, 2004)

This is a straightforward choice between voting to protect the financial interests of the banks or the security interests of the nation.