Gov. Greg Abbott announced that the Texas Department of Public Safety will immediately cease enhanced inspections of Mexican commercial vehicles crossing into Texas from Nuevo Leon. However, troopers will continue the inspections at ports throughout the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere across the border.
The announcement came during a joint news conference with Nuevo Leon Gov. Samuel Alejandro Garcia at the Colombia Solidarity International Bridge in Laredo on Wednesday afternoon.
“Nuevo Leon is going to compromise to increase security,” Garcia said.
“If Nuevo Leon can assure security, technology, security checkpoints and patrol the border to help Texas — and Texas can help us with more merchandise, with more commerce — we will do it,” he added.
Abbott explained that the Mexican governor had agreed to step up border security efforts on his side of the border, including by conducting increased patrols and checkpoints along the Rio Grande in Nuevo Leon.
“And since Nuevo Leon has increased the security on its side of the border, the Texas Department of Public Safety can return to its previous practice of random searches of vehicles crossing the bridge from Nuevo Leon,” Abbott said.
“The effect of this will be that the bridge from Nuevo Leon and Texas will return to normal, effective immediately, right now. It will remain that way as long as Nuevo Leon executes this historic agreement,” he added.
But the Texas governor warned that the cessation of the time-consuming DPS inspections only applies to ports of entry that border Nuevo Leon, which shares just a narrow strip of the Mexican international border near Laredo.
Three other Mexican states border Texas. The Rio Grande Valley and much of the ranch counties border Tamaulipas. Coahuila borders Texas from just north of Laredo all the way to the Big Bend region, while the remainder north to El Paso is bordered by Chihuahua.
For those three states, commercial traffic crossing at their ports will continue to see enhanced DPS inspections. That includes the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, which saw dayslong crossing delays starting last Thursday before Mexican truckers staged a blockade on the Reynosa side of the bridge.
As commercial traffic ground to a halt in Pharr — and slowed significantly at other ports — Abbott came under fire, even drawing criticism from within his own party.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller — who has former President Donald Trump’s endorsement for reelection — on Tuesday called on Abbott to end the inspection policy, citing the economic harm it was causing.
But on Wednesday, Abbott was dismissive of his own state official, saying Miller had been out of the loop on what had been a very deliberate plan to force changes in Mexican border security protocols.
“One thing is clear and that is he had no clue what we were doing, and about the negotiations that we had ongoing with regard to officials in Mexico,” Abbott said of Miller.
“So he was just completely uninformed,” he added.
If Miller had been kept in the dark about Abbott’s ultimate goals in implementing the inspection policy, then so, too, had numerous other officials on both sides of the border.
“The new inspection measures are creating havoc and economic pain on both sides of the border, and as this Quad-State region suffers, so is Texas and vise-versa,” Tamaulipas Gov. Francisco Garcia Cabeza de Vaca and Coahuila Gov. Miguel Angel Riquelme Solis said in a joint letter addressed to Abbott Wednesday.
“Unfortunately, political points have never been a good recipe to address common challenges or threats. … What we have today is a no-win situation for anyone,” they said.
The Border Delegation of the Texas House of Representatives were also caught off-guard by the policy.
In a letter addressed to Abbott on Wednesday, the delegation said Abbott had implemented the inspection policy without consulting any local officials.
“This lack of localized discussion greatly disrupted international trade and is significantly hurting Texas business and commerce,” the letter states.
“We have heard reports that some Texas ports are moving less than 25% of the cargo than they were just days prior to your order,” it further states.
The Tamaulipas and Coahuila governors expressed their concern that the slowdown in commercial traffic was causing economic and environmental damage, while also increasing inflation.
But nowhere in their letter did the governors indicate that they had been in negotiations with Abbott to end the policy prior to Wednesday. Instead, the letter was an emphatic plea for him to stop.
“We ask you to reconsider these overzealous inspections,” the Mexican governors wrote.
“People are having trouble putting food on their tables, and these policies will make it even harder. These acts only intensify the problems, especially if people lose their jobs while hurting families and businesses on both sides of the border.”
But Abbott was seemingly unsympathetic to the economic ramifications the inspection policy has had in the one week it has been in effect.
Instead, he downplayed just how long the crossing delays have been — saying crossing times “suffered a few hours of delay.” Abbott also claimed those who complained were the same people who have been urging stronger border security.
“The people in Texas who may have suffered some hardship because it took a few extra hours to get something across the port, those are the very same Texans who agreed overwhelmingly that … we as a people have suffered substantially from the open border policies of the Biden administration,” Abbott said.
“I tell you what, I’ve been to Del Rio, I’ve been up and down the entire border and I know exactly what the consumers along those borders have been saying,” he said.
However, it has been mostly Mexican truckers who have felt the brunt of the policy. Within hours of the inspection policy going into effect last Thursday, long lines began to form at bridges all along the border.
At the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge, DPS was able to inspect 115 trucks last Friday — which is less than 4% of the 3,000 trucks that normally cross each day.
The number of inspections went on to plummet each day until Mexican owner/operators staged a blockade on the Reynosa side of the bridge Monday.
But prior to the blockade, those truckers had found themselves stranded on the bridge for three or more days without access to food, water or restrooms.
Nor was it long before the inspection policy sent ripples throughout both binational and domestic commerce in general.
American truckers who arrived in the Valley eager to transport freshly imported goods farther north found cold storage and other packing facilities here empty.
Likewise, truckers looking to export loads of pork and beef into Mexico — which is one of the largest consumers of those American commodities — worried the refrigerators in their trailers would run out of diesel and their cargo would spoil.
Leopoldo “Leo” Chow, an adviser with CANACAR, the National Chamber of Freight Transportation, a trucking industry group in Mexico, said the commercial traffic delays were costing hundreds of millions of dollars per day.
“It cost millions of man hours and literally warehouses not having any type of produce or shipments to process,” Chow said Wednesday.
Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee seeking to unseat Abbott as governor in November, held a news conference at a cold storage facility not far from the Pharr bridge Tuesday to discuss the commerce issue.
“We lose out on $216 million a day every day that these bridges are shut down — just here in Pharr and Reynosa,” O’Rourke said.
The slowdowns impacted every port in Texas, as truckers either faced inspections, or sought to cross at alternate ports of entry.
On Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection — which referred to Abbott’s inspection policy as “unnecessary” — announced that commercial traffic dropped 60% at the very same Laredo port where Abbott held his news conference Wednesday.
Ports of entry in El Paso also saw commercial traffic slowdowns, with traffic at Ysleta dropping 50%, and 30% at the Bridge of Americas.
Abbott said he expected to begin similar negotiations with the other three Mexican governors as soon as Thursday.
Chow, who had been conducting negotiations of his own throughout the week with the truckers blockading the Pharr bridge, confirmed that Texas has opened talks with Tamaulipan officials.
“We spoke with the office of the governor here in Tamaulipas and they’re in contact with the office of the governor in Texas and hopefully they can come to terms now to do something similar to what the governor of Nuevo Leon and Texas did,” Chow said.
Just as Abbott was making his announcement in Laredo, Chow and his team had found success in their negotiations with protesters. North and southbound traffic at the Pharr bridge began to flow again as of about 3 p.m. Wednesday.
The commercial truck traffic began to move just after Mexican cartel members reportedly set fire to several trucks that had been waiting on the Mexican highway leading to the Pharr bridge.
Bridge officials said those trucks had not been a part of the blockade.
Mexican officials later detained three people related to the fires.
With the blockade ended, and a binational solution seemingly on the horizon, Chow reiterated the commitment by Mexican truckers to follow whatever regulations both countries impose.
“The intent of the drivers of the Mexican trucking community is to comply with all U.S. regulations — safety, immigration, whatever they may be,” Chow said.
