You don’t often go by your bricksand- mortar bank branch these days, what with the electronic wonders of direct deposit and the fact that most of your purchases are made on a credit card.

But sometimes you want some cash on hand, for emergencies, or for whatever you want — it’s your money. So you fire up the ATM outside the bank with your debit card and punch in your PIN and the amount you want. The machine dutifully delivers the greenbacks.

And then immediately thereafter, if your withdrawal was $200 or more, writes a snitch note to the federal government noting that you have had the audacity to ask for some folding money.

Say what? That’s the plan for you and your resources as backed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, if so far just in select counties along the American-Mexican border. If Treasury gets its way, every time you take out $200 or more from a bank in one of 30 ZIP Codes in border counties in California and Texas, or engage in certain other cash transactions, that will trigger a Currency Transaction Report to the feds.

This is a really, really low threshold for such blatant interference in Americans’ personal financial affairs. And it’s yet another intrusive result of a Day 1 executive order signed by President Donald Trump that designated “certain international cartels” as “foreign terrorist organizations,” a classification that according to the State Department “play[s] a critical role in our fight against terrorism and [is] an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business,” according to reporting by Reason magazine.

On Tuesday, a federal court in San Diego put a temporary halt to the financial surveillance rule, at least for California’s San Diego and Imperial counties, after a group of local businesses teamed up with the Institute for Justice to sue the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) over its extreme new regulations.

The regulations themselves aren’t new. Treasury’s hoped-for edict in its desire to go after drug traffickers is rather an extreme revision to the longstanding reporting requirement throughout the country on cash transactions over $10,000. When a CTR is triggered, banks and other institutions need to record a Social Security or tax ID number for the person getting the cash.

Truthfully, an easy argument can be made that even that amount is way too low. The federal government began requiring reporting of cash transactions of $10,000 or more back in 1952. By that logic, with inflation, the number should be $180,000 today.

The cash-based businesses that sued and achieved this temporary stay include firms that provide check cashing, money transfers and money order services for working class customers, many of whom do not have bank accounts.

Here’s hoping the temporary stay becomes permanent.