Some 8,000 trailers with goods estimated at $1 billion have been stranded on the Mexican side over the past week, according to Manuel Sotelo, president of the truckers association of Ciudad Juárez, a major manufacturing center across from El Paso, Texas.
Some companies were shipping goods through entry points in New Mexico and Arizona to avoid long wait times at the Texas border, Sotelo told Reuters on Monday.
The delays forced a Canadian maker of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles to suspend production Monday and Tuesday at three Ciudad Juárez factories that employ about 9,000 people.
“Due to the waiting times on the international bridges in Ciudad Juárez, we have had a significant reduction in the volume of units that we can export daily,” the Quebec-based company BRP said in a statement.
Jesús Salayandía, national vice president of Maquiladora and Border Strips of the National Chamber of the Processing Industry (Canacintra), said he expected other companies in Ciudad Juárez to announce temporary technical stoppages if long wait times at the border continued.
U.S. border authorities suspended cargo processing at one of El Paso’s international bridges last week to free agents to process more migrant arrivals.
About 500 trucks normally cross that bridge from Mexico each day, although only 40% carry cargo to the United States, Customs and Border Protection said in response to a Reuters request for comment. He added that “suspending services there would have the least overall impact on our trading partners.”
Texas authorities also began conducting enhanced vehicle inspections of trucks and trailers on the city’s two other bridges.
The measures caused the Mexican Foreign Ministry to urge US authorities not to take “unilateral measures” that complicate trade. Truck drivers in Mexico told Reuters they had to wait hours to cross bridges.
In addition to the slowdown for trucks and trailers, about 2,400 Union Pacific railroad cars were also paralyzed after border authorities temporarily stopped traffic on the international railroad crossing bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday.
Union Pacific told Reuters it expected to finish the backlog of work by Tuesday morning. He declined to estimate the financial impact.
Some freight train services were also disrupted in Mexico, when Ferromex temporarily suspended operations of about 60 northbound trains last week after a half-dozen migrants were injured or killed.
Previous slowdowns at border crossings between the United States and Mexico have led to total losses in the billions of dollars, according to analysis by Texas-based economic research group The Perryman Group.
The last slowdown of this type, in April 2022, is estimated to have represented a daily loss to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $996.3 million.