Mexico border areas: Coalition urges Biden and Obrador to address border security

The coalition consists of cross-border business and trade groups in the U.S. and Mexico, including organizations from San Diego, California, to Brownsville, Texas. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

A broad coalition of nearly 30 U.S. and Mexican trade stakeholders is urging Presidents Joe Biden and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to address migrant issues they say are impacting cross-border trade.

Led by the Washington-based Border Trade Alliance, the Texas Association of Business and the Confederation of Industrial Chambers of Mexico (CONCAMIN), the coalition sent a letter to Biden and Lopez Obrador on Wednesday asking them to work quickly to improve the security situation. the border.

“The US-Mexico border is a region of enormous economic promise, but all of that is at risk if our governments fail to ensure that cross-border trade and travel occurs in a safe, well-managed and adequately resourced environment,” says Border Trade Alliance. President Britton Clarke writes this in the letter. “If the disruptions that have plagued the border region in recent months are allowed to continue, we can expect states to take action, often with responses that will cause shipping delays and put upward pressure on costs.”

The cross-border business community has been forced to deal with significant shipping delays at the border as the Department of Homeland Security and state governments have responded to spikes in asylum seekers with port-of-entry closures and new inspection protocols, the letter said.

The letter arrives about a week after the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) renewed the state’s controversial safety inspections at the Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge in El Paso.

The inspections, which began on April 29 and reportedly ended on Friday, involved stopping and inspecting all commercial vehicles arriving from Mexico.

Wait times for trucks at the Ysleta-Zaragoza Bridge sometimes exceeded eight hours on the general commercial lanes and for vehicles authorized for the Free and Secure Trade program lanes. Normal wait times are about 35 minutes or less to cross the bridge.

DPS initiated similar inspections in El Paso and at the Del Rio border crossing in South Texas and the Marcelino Serna port of entry in Tornillo, Texas, in September and October of last year, and in Brownsville and Laredo, Texas, in 2022.

Mexico’s National Chamber of Transformation Industry (CANACINTRA) told Revista Transportes y Turismo that the latest inspections carried out by Texas cost the trucking industry as much as $35 million per day.

Glenn Hamer, president and CEO of the Texas Association of Business, said that while the U.S. and Mexico are each other’s top trading partners, “we can’t take that for granted. “If the two countries fail to tackle irregular immigration and illegal trade, the trade relationship will deteriorate, and with it the global economic competitiveness of our region.”

Illegal crossings at the border have fallen by about 40% in the first three months of 2024 since rising to record levels in December, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

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