MISSION, TEXAS – Even as President Trump was vowing hellfire for the trade that has forged the U.S.-Mexico border into a business beehive, crews proceeded laying cement for yet another road to channel foreign cargo crossing deep into the American heartland.
Much of the new road will run atop levees built long ago to tame the once-menacing border stream. It’s but the latest to be thrown up along the entire border since free trade with Mexico became law three decades ago.
“You can’t roll history back,” says Sam Vale, owner of another bridge, some 40 miles upriver from Anzalduas, one of only two privately owned along the border.
“In the end it comes down to profit and free trade has been profitable,” the 82-year old Vale says. “This economic engine will continue. It will never, ever be stopped.”
Analysts and officials say Mexico and Canada largely emerged solid from the sweeping tariffs that Trump announced Wednesday afternoon. While both countries face some of the new duties – including 25 percent taxes slapped on aluminum and steel – most exports conforming to their free trade agreement with the U.S. will be untouched.
"There are no additional tariffs,” a relieved President Claudia Sheinbaum told Mexico on her daily morning televised briefing. “It has to do with the strength of our government and, as I always say, it has to do with the strength of the Mexican people”.
U.S. and world markets Thursday and Friday underscored the tariffs’ winners and losers. The Mexican peso strengthened slightly and the Canadian dollar held steady even as U.S. exchanges plummeted.
Not all was positive, though. Stellantins, owner of Chrysler, announced it would pause production at two assembly plants in Mexico and Canada, according to CNBC. The move will lead to temporary layoffs of more than 5,000 workers.
Trump officials have cautioned other nations facing far worse duties to await negotiation before retaliating with tariffs of their own.
But Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday his country was putting a 25 percent tariff on imported U.S. vehicles.
Sheinbaum so far hasn’t retaliated against the 25 percent U.S. duties being slapped on Mexican steel, aluminum and the myriad things made from them. About 80 percent of Mexico exports go to U.S. buyers.
Likely, no other world leader has gone as far as Sheinbaum in trying to meet Trump’s demands.
Just six months into the job, Mexico’s first woman president has curbed the flow of migrants crossing Mexican territory enroute to the U.S. She also has shut down meth and fentanyl labs at a pace unmatched by her predecessors. Last month, Sheinbaum’s administration sent 29 of Mexico’s top crime bosses north to face U.S. justice.
While their trilateral trade agreement, known as USMCA, has protected Mexico and Canada so far, the pact is up for review.
"This is not over yet. This is a chapter, but it is not over," Mexican Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard cautioned Thursday during the televised morning briefing.” We are entering a new trading system in the world."
Mexico exports nearly three million vehicles to the United States annually, more than any other country. It also sells 43 percent of the auto parts and components imported to the U.S In all, Mexico is the biggest U.S. trading partner, with nearly $900 billion in annual bilateral trade. Just in the state of Texas, Mexican trade totaled $540 billion in 2024.
President Trump has made no secret of his goal to bring the auto industry – which anchors Mexico’s rapid industrialization in recent decades -- home to the United States.
“All we’re doing is saying you can’t come in unless you build here,” Trump has said repeatedly.
Accelerating free trade with Mexico since the 1980s has indeed been a boost for U.S. border communities that long suffered deep poverty. As elsewhere, here in far South Texas huge warehouses have sprouted in former sugar cane and onion fields in rural communities like Relampago. Cargo trucks jam the highways heading north.
There’s a collective sense of relief all along the border including El Paso and Ciudad juarez. Cargo truck rumble past EP Logistics massive El Paso facility. The company is strategically located on Pan American drive – near a busy international bridge. President and founder Octavio Saavedra has been involved in cross border logistics for 30 years.
“Our expectation is for this foreign trade zone to continue to grow,” he said. The company operates in various locations across northern including Chihuahua and Monterrey.
Saavedra said that the tariffs on imports from China during Trump’s first term and broken Chinese supply chains during the pandemic benefited Mexico as companies relocated to neighboring Mexico from Asia.
“We saw this big boom here on the southern border,” he said. “As you can see there are a bunch of buildings going up here in El Paso and also in Juarez there’s a tremendous amount of new construction that went up,”he said.
Saavedra’s massive warehouses offer a glimpse of the cross-border supply chains that include auto parts and electronic components as well as finished products like medical devices and refrigerators.
But the uncertainty during the first few months of the current Trump administration has slowed expansion all along the border. “It has stopped the investment in this area because whatever goes into Mexico here in Juarez, there’s a huge investment also in El Paso, on the U.S. side. It goes hand in hand, “he said.
That view is shared in South Texas. “Right now, it’s a mess. We don’t know what will happen from one day to the next,” said Jorge Martinez, a vice president in McAllen for Galvotec, a family-owned fabricator of components made from magnesium and other metals imported from China and Mexico. “But I think for Mexico and Canada things will continue to run the same way.”
Down river from here, in the booming city of Brownsville. Mayor John Cowen touted several achievements for his region, from a massive gas terminal at the port of Brownsville to Space X, including rocket production and a testing facility.
Still, issues like “tariffs” Cowen said at a recent conference at Harvard University, represent “significant headwinds for the opportunities that we have in front of us.”
This story was edited by Dudley Althaus and published by KTEP News in partnership Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
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