Booming Port of Laredo a linchpin in global trade, and San Antonio's 'right in the heart of it'

Trucks line up from Mexico to enter the U.S. in the fast lanes at the World Trade Bridge in Laredo.
Jessica Phelps


A truck entering the U.S. from Mexico pulls through one of the fast lanes at the World Trade Bridge in Laredo.
Jessica Phelps


C.H. Robinson has opened on of the largest cross-border logistics facilities in Laredo, Texas.
C.H. Robinson


Customs and Border Patrol agents in Laredo sort through a shipment of shoes heading to Mexico to determine if they are fake. The Nike shoes were already found to be counterfit.
Jessica Phelps

San Antonio Express-News
By Richard Webner, Contributor
Updated Nov 26, 2023 9:32 a.m.

LAREDO — The Port of Laredo is fast emerging as the nation’s top port — a linchpin in global commerce supplying Americans with new cars and electronics and keeping their refrigerators full of fresh produce.

With an airport, rail bridge and two bridges carrying multiple lanes over the Rio Grande, the port’s traffic soared with the growth of the Texas-Mexico manufacturing ecosystem and as companies shift production from China to avoid tariffs and simplify supply chains, a trend known as nearshoring. Tesla Inc., Toyota Motor Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. are among those investing in factories on both sides of the border.

And it’s only a 2.5-hour drive from San Antonio.

“We’re kind of right in the heart of it, because much of what’s happening in Mexico is happening in northern Mexico. That trade is coming across the border, and it has to cross in Laredo,” said Sarah Carabias-Rush of Greater: SATX, the region’s economic development organization. “We see ourselves really as one large pipeline, one large mega-region.”

State of Trade

This is one in an occasional series on elements of the South Texas Triangle, a region that connects San Antonio with Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley, Corpus Christi and the Northern Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon.

That pipeline keeps getting bigger.

The Port of Laredo has long vied with the Port of Los Angeles and Chicago-O’Hare International Airport to be America’s top port by trade value, taking the lead for a month or two but missing the mark in yearly rankings. This year, it has maintained a lead with $241 billion in value up to September, compared with $217 billion for the Port of Los Angeles and $197 billion for Chicago-O’Hare.

It’s not just a blip. The port’s trade value has been growing faster, too, putting it on a trajectory to stay at the top. Between 2021 and 2022, Port of Laredo trade grew 20.6% to $299.4 billion, compared with a 5.3% increase for the Port of Los Angeles and 8.3% for Chicago O’Hare.

“It used to be Port Laredo would be number three, two or one dependent upon the month and the seasonality of Christmas presents coming in from China or an automotive tariff that might have been put in by past-President (Donald) Trump,” said Gene Lindgren, president and CEO of the Laredo Economic Development Corp. “But we’ve been consistent since last October.”

San Antonio’s leaders view the growth as an economic opportunity. The city’s proximity to the port and the access it provides to low-cost Mexican manufacturing helped lead Toyota to build its South Side factory in 2003. It was also a factor in British heavy equipment manufacturer JCB’s recent decision to do likewise.  

H-E-B, another pillar of the San Antonio economy, also relies on cross-border trade. The supermarket chain now has 57 H-E-B stores and 21 Mi Tienda stores in Mexico, spokeswoman Dya Campos said. Like many U.S. grocery chains, it gathers much of its produce — avocados, tomatoes, berries, lettuce — from Mexico; some of its store-brand products come from there, too, including tortillas and salsas.

Global heavyweight

Though it’s been picking up speed the past few years, the port has been growing in importance for decades, especially since NAFTA’s passage in 1994 eased trade across the border. And this year, Mexico overtook China to become America’s top trading partner, a position China held for nearly a decade, according to Daniel Covarrubias, director of the Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development at Texas A&M International University.

His comparison of the port’s truck cargo with that of ports handling container ships put it 11th in a list of the world’s top container ports, between Rotterdam and Dubai.

“We wanted to see if worldwide, we could say that Port Laredo was the most important land crossing in the world,” he said. “And it sure looks like it.”

The trade surge comes with challenges. It is straining both Laredo’s border crossings and the highways and railways leading into the U.S. interior, with lawmakers and officials calling for expansion.

In 2021, the Texas Department of Transportation released its Texas-Mexico Border Transportation Master Plan, which presents a strategy for handling the growth. It forecast that the number of commercial vehicles passing through Laredo would more than double over the next 30 years, from 2.4 million in 2019 to 6.2 million in 2050.

The World Trade Bridge — the eight-lane behemoth carrying the bulk of Laredo’s border traffic — would see a rise from 2 million vehicles a year to 5.1 million, according to the report. A proposed project to double its lane capacity is snarled in federal permitting requirements.

“The thing is that we have the same infrastructure; a commercial bridge has not been built since 2000. That’s why there’s a pressing need for more international trade infrastructure,” Covarrubias said. “While the port is still pretty efficient — you can’t imagine how you can handle 20,000 trucks a day, but they do — more growth is coming.”

Keeping up

The port’s success is due in part to geography: The city sits at the southern end of the Interstate 35 freight corridor, running 1,500 miles to Duluth, Minn., and at the northern end of Mexico’s Highway 85, which leads to Monterrey and its thriving manufacturing sector.

Another factor is the trade infrastructure that Laredo — a 95% Hispanic city of 256,000 — has built over the decades. Along with bridges and railways, it boasts sprawling industrial parks and an efficient apparatus of logistics companies, truck drivers and customs brokers.

Industrial space is in such high demand that any new construction is snatched as soon as it’s built, said Lindgren, the local economic development leader. “Effectively zero” space is available, he said; in the last three months of 2022, the city’s industrial market had a 1.5% vacancy rate on 35.9 million square feet of inventory, according to commercial real estate broker CBRE.

Lindgren said he works with landowners and developers to help create “very large shovel-ready industrial parks.” The area is set to add about 10 million square feet of space over the next two years.

One of the newest and largest of the industrial facilities was opened in September by C.H. Robinson, a global logistics giant headquartered in Minnesota. The 400,000-square-foot facility sits on former ranchland in an industrial park along Mines Road, four lanes running between the World Trade Bridge and the port’s second-busiest bridge, 15 miles northwest, the Colombia Solidarity Bridge.

The facility is a cross-dock, meaning semi-trucks can dock on either side. The design is tailored to the way trucking is done in Laredo, where three drivers are involved in the typical border crossing: Coming from the south, a Mexican driver takes the load close to the border before handing it to a driver who specializes in crossing over; that driver then hands it off at a facility like C.H. Robinson’s to an American driver who takes it the rest of the way to its U.S. destination.

Shipping experts say it’s done that way for several reasons, including the language barrier. With more traffic coming north than heading south, it prevents Mexican drivers from having to return from a long journey with an empty load.

Having the trucks dock on both sides makes the operation smoother, said Mike Burkhart, C.H. Robinson’s vice president for Mexico. The forklifts carrying the loads back and forth are less likely to cross paths.

“Instead of it maybe taking two minutes to pull a pallet and bring it to the truck, it may only take seconds,” he said. “Time is the key factor here.”

More such facilities are on the way. In the surrounding patches of desert, signs advertise plans for a half-dozen other facilities — some half-built, others platted — including two with more than 400,000 square feet of space.

“I’m already looking at what does the future look like, because of this increased demand that really Laredo hasn’t been able to keep up with,” Lindgren said. “There’s not a lot of real estate opportunity in Laredo; there’s not a lot of availability in terms of warehouse infrastructure.”

Automaking ties

A management philosophy developed decades ago by Toyota has big impacts, too.

In 21^st-century global shipping, minutes matter — especially in the auto industry, with more companies using Toyota’s “just-in-time” manufacturing system, in which they keep lean supplies of inventory at hand and lean heavily on supply chains to perform. 

The system is efficient but leaves companies at risk of supply disruptions.

Christian Guerra, president of locally based Toyota supplier Avanzar Interior Technologies, said a break in any part of the intricate supply chain for Toyota’s plant could force production to shut down, potentially costing Toyota and its suppliers millions.

It’s a “tightrope,” he said.

The supply chain for Avanzar — which makes the seating, door and overhead systems for Tundra and Tacoma pickups and Sequoia SUVs — is tightly interwoven with operations across the border. The company has two plants with a total of about 500 employees near Toyota’s own facilities in Mexico, in Guanajuato and Baja California. Some components of its products pass over the border twice before they’re assembled into a vehicle.

Already, Guerra said, Avanzar deals “on a monthly basis” with traffic stalling at the border as computer systems malfunction in the customs operations on the U.S. or the Mexico side.

“When it stops, and you’re running as tight as we are, with about one day of inventory and excess, because we’re practicing the Toyota way, you’re dependent on those deliveries happening on time,” he said. “If the border has a four- or five-hour delay, and we’re used to it coming through on a 10-hour window … we’re starting to get into very, very uncomfortable land. If it goes on for four or five more hours, now we’ve impacted the line. It’s that tight.”

Border bottleneck

The World Trade Bridge runs west to east over a straight stretch of the Rio Grande about seven miles north of Laredo’s historic downtown. On either side, single-family neighborhoods have sprung up directly on the river. The nearest homes are less than 50 yards from the outer lanes, overlooking the bumper-to-bumper trucks with their roaring diesel engines and hissing brakes.

A plain trailer parked nearby represents the hope of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the crossings, that it might ease bottlenecks with new technology that speeds the inspection process. Inside, nine agents sit at a wall of screens examining ghostly images of passing trucks — from their fronts, sides, tops, bottoms — captured by giant X-ray machines the trucks drive through at a crawl.

The screens list information about each vehicle: the driver, the freight, its origin. The X-ray shows what’s really inside: a stack of catalytic converters, for example. Another screen shows the average time spent analyzing the image for each truck: just shy of two minutes.

The trailer operation is a pilot program. CBP is now building four such X-ray systems so all trucks coming over the bridge can pass through.

“That’s gonna be the game-changing piece, because right now a lot of it is done randomly,” said Alberto Flores, director for the Laredo Port of Entry. “With these systems and our scanning prior to the actual interaction with the office, we’re going to be able to determine whether or not we want to further inspect the truck.”

The new technology is welcome as efforts have stalled to expand the Port of Laredo’s physical infrastructure.

For years, a plan has been in the works to expand the World Trade Bridge from eight lanes to 18, building a new span over the river. That plan is awaiting a presidential permit. Last year, the city of Laredo — which co-owns the bridge with Mexico’s federal government — was told it needed to undertake an environmental review.

Pushing for permits

Local leaders — frustrated that they cannot apply for grant money for the expansion until they get the permit — are lobbying for the process to be expedited. A bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers including Sen. Ted and Rep. Henry Cuellar, are pushing for changes to the process.

“There’s no clear directive — the Department of State says ‘No, it’s in the president’s hand’; the president’s office, ‘No, it’s on Department of State',” said Yvette Limon, bridge director for the city of Laredo.

She and other leaders don’t doubt the project will happen — eventually. A consultant has estimated the expanded bridge will be in operation in 2027.

TxDOT’s Border Transportation Master Plan has forecast that if nothing is done, the average crossing time at the bridge would soar to nearly nine hours in 2050 from a half-hour in 2019.

Burkhart, with C.H. Robinson, said that in the 23 years he’s been working in Laredo he’s seen traffic snarls worsening.

“There was no issue getting from the bridge where the product crosses to a warehouse — maybe a 10- or 15-minute transit. Now Laredo is absolutely congested,” he said. “All you see are trucks in Laredo. To get from that same bridge to that same warehouse may take upwards of an hour. It is a completely different environment today than it was 20 years ago. And that’s due to the increased and ongoing growth caused by nearshoring.”

Meanwhile, leaders are promoting other infrastructure projects. They are awaiting permits to expand the Colombia bridge and for a Mexican entrepreneur, Glafiro Montemayor, to build a new bridge on 7,000 acres he and his family own on either side of the border about 18 miles south of the World Trade Bridge. Kansas City Southern already is building a second rail bridge, doubling its container capacity.

Plans are in the works to upgrade some of the area’s state highways into interstates, providing trucking alternatives to Interstate 35. Texas 59, which runs east of Laredo toward Houston, would be made into Interstate 69, a route pointing toward the industrial Midwest where many of the auto parts made in Mexico are headed.

The highway projects — another would establish an interstate west toward Eagle Pass — are being funded piecemeal, Lindgren said. “I don’t know if this, this and this will get done in my lifetime — portions of it will. But progress is being made,” he said.

Another local frustration is that TxDOT awards funding for highway projects based in part on an area’s population, putting Laredo at a disadvantage to major cities.

“When it comes to competing against the San Antonios and Houstons and Dallases, we’re gonna fall way behind,” said Robert Morris, president of the Laredo U.S. Customs Brokers Association. “We feel like our infrastructure doesn’t just affect Laredoans, doesn’t just affect Texas — it affects the entire United States.”