On April 14, 2025, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced the renewal of its Geographic Targeting Orders (GTOs), mandating U.S. title insurance companies to identify the natural persons behind shell companies used in non-financed acquisitions of residential real estate.

On April 7, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memorandum (the “Memorandum”) to all Department of Justice (DOJ) employees, announcing a significant shift in the Department’s digital asset enforcement priorities.[1]

On April 29, 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) decided that the Maltese investor citizenship scheme violates EU law and that the acquisition of EU citizenship cannot result from a commercial transaction.[1]

On April 22, 2025, a federal grand jury in Central Islip, New York, returned an indictment, which the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed on April 24, charging a man living in Long Island, New York with lying on his applications for permanent residency and citizenship by concealing his past role as a leader and perpetrator of the genocide in Rwanda.[1]

On April 22, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio proposed a significant reform of the U.S. State Department that would close the Office of Global Criminal Justice (GCJ) and the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO). The proposal will also close the office dealing with refugees and migration.[1]

On April 15, 2025, shortly after a Peruvian court sentenced former Peruvian President Ollanta Humala and his wife, Nadine Heredia, to 15 years in prison for money laundering, Brazil granted Ms. Heredia diplomatic asylum.

On April 19, 2025, around 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, the Supreme Court released a dissent by two of its conservative justices and issued an unsigned order directing the Trump administration not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of the court.[1

On April 21, 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released a new report on a global expansion of East and Southeast Asian organized crime groups. The report concentrates on an emerging phenomenon: amidst heightened awareness and enforcement action, Asian crime syndicates are expanding operations deeper into many of the most remote, vulnerable, underprepared parts of the region — and beyond.

On April 10, 2025, in an unsigned order, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ordered the government to try to return a Salvadoran national and U.S. permanent resident, Abrego Garcia, whom it had wrongly deported to a terrorist prison in El Salvador. However, the Court also observed that the courts may not have the authority to require the executive branch to return him. After the order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis attempted to force the administration to communicate its efforts, or lack thereof, to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release. Instead, the administration made an emergency appeal and request for a stay, which the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit quickly and unanimously rejected.[1]

On March 31, 2025, the United States sanctioned six Chinese and Hong Kong officials in response to acts of transnational repression.[1] Transnational repression is “any action taken by a foreign government or an agent of a foreign government involving the transgression of national borders through physical, digital, or analog means in order to intimidate, silence coerce, harass, or harm members of diaspora and exile communities… in order to prevent the exercise of their human rights.”[2]