Trade officials from both the U.S. and Mexico have called for Gov. Greg Abbott to stop state-run cargo truck inspections at the border, which they say are causing major disruption to commercial trade flowing across the border.

The inspections, performed by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), began at the Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge in El Paso and the Camino Real Bridge in Eagle Pass on September 20.

The inspections are an effort to stop cartels from smuggling drugs across the border, according to DPS officials. They are being conducted in addition to the usual cargo inspections conducted by federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials. Border officials are reporting wait times exceeding four hours in each city due to the extra inspections. 

Homero Balderas, general manager for the City of Eagle Pass International Bridge System, said, “The DPS inspection is slowing down the commercial traffic flow” and reducing the number of vehicles passing through each day.

“It creates congestion that impacts our commercial traffic heading to Mexico,” Balderas said, per FreightWaves. 

“Overall it’s a bad situation; we need something to change soon. In two weeks, we have seen a drop of 30,000 [passenger] vehicles and 4,000 cargo trucks.”

These statements have also been backed up by Mexican officials, who claim that the inspections have disrupted supply chains in the country.

Thor Salayandía, the national vice president of Maquiladora and Borders of the National Chamber of Processing Industries, accused Abbott of “politicizing the immigration issue and attacking Joe Biden and Mexico on this issue.”

“He has the agents doing some checks where he is no longer looking for migrants. He wants to hurt the maquila and is doing that,” Salayandía told the Spanish news agency EFE.

“It is regrettable that only one person, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, is the one who is causing all this damage to both the economy of Juarez and the companies that own the maquiladoras. It is very unfortunate that so far no one has been able to stop him, not even President Biden.”

Manuel Sotero Suarez, vice president of the National Chamber of Cargo Transportation (Canacar), stated that more than $1.5 billion worth of goods have been turned away at the border due to the inspections.

“No one is coordinating operations to solve or stop the problem. The governor of Texas is affecting the economy of both countries with between 10,000 and 11,000 stranded loads,” he said, per EFE.

“If we multiply that by $135,000 per load, we are talking about $1.5 billion, which is not a loss, but goods that have not been able to cross.”

Some companies, such as Bombardier Recreational Products, have halted operations in Mexico since goods are overflowing their warehouses due to the trade route disruption.

“Due to the waiting times on the international bridges in Ciudad Juarez, we have had a significant reduction in the volume of units that we can export daily,” the company said in a statement, per FreightWaves.

“This is why we have made the decision to suspend production in our three plants for two days to allow our exports to stabilize and relieve the capacity of our warehouses.”

However, when similar inspections of cargo trucks were conducted by the state in 2022, DPS Director Steve McCraw claimed that while the added inspections did not turn up any illegal drugs, they served as effective deterrents. 

He said the cartels who smuggle drugs “don’t like troopers stopping them, certainly north of the border, and they certainly don’t like 100% inspections of commercial vehicles on the bridges. And once that started, we’ve seen a decreased amount of trafficking across bridges — common sense,” per The Texas Tribune.

Conversely, Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, argued that if smugglers were trying to hide illegal drugs inside a commercial truck, the federal Customs and Border Protection officers would likely discover the contraband before turning the vehicles over to DPS for inspection.

“It just seems odd to me that DPS would be that much of a deterrent for smugglers deciding whether to bring something after already passing through the gauntlet of CBP,” he said in 2022, the Tribune reported.