This Border Town Out-Traded China

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HAPPY MONDAY

Laredo moved more freight than the U.S. did with all of China in May, even as Mexican carriers caught hauling illegal U.S. domestic freight lose their cross-border authority entirely.

Plus:

• Trucking Costs Just Hit An All-Time High

• A Lawsuit Wants To Freeze CDLs In Two States

• Top 10 LTL Carriers Keep Shrinking

💡 QUESTION OF THE DAY:

🍳 WHAT’S COOKIN’ IN FREIGHT

📈 Trucking Costs Just Hit An All-Time High. ATRI's newest annual benchmarking report, released July 15, puts the average cost to run a truck at $2.336 per mile for 2025 — the highest figure the group has recorded since it began tracking in 2016. Tolls jumped 13.2%. Repair and maintenance rose 8.6%. Rates didn't keep pace, so carriers parked equipment instead: fleets cut truck counts 2.4% and left another 10% unseated, the steepest capacity pullback since the 2022 downturn began. Insurance alone rose 3.9% to 10.6 cents a mile, 1.2 percentage points above consumer inflation that year.

🚨 A Lawsuit Wants To Freeze CDLs In Two States. The Small Business in Transportation Coalition sharpened its case July 10, filing with the D.C. Circuit to force FMCSA to decertify New York and California's CDL programs outright — the first state decertification attempt in the law's history. Attorney Greg Reed called it "unprecedented" and said it faces long odds, since courts aren't built to compel agency inaction. But even Reed doesn't downplay the stakes: two of the largest CDL-issuing states losing new-license authority "would very quickly and significantly decrease capacity." One caveat that matters for planning: a decertification order wouldn't affect CDLs already issued, only new ones.

🏭 Top 10 LTL Carriers Keep Shrinking. Knight-Swift's LTL subsidiary, AAA Cooper, added four terminals in May (Detroit and Toledo among them), and was the fastest-growing LTL carrier last year by both volume (15.3%) and revenue (19.7%). Averitt, a smaller regional carrier, upgraded its Tulsa facility from 3,500 to 16,800 square feet in June. But 2025's full data tells a different story at the top: the 10 largest LTL carriers lost four terminals combined last year, while carriers outside the Top 25 added 134. Total dock doors industry-wide remain 4.8% below the 2022 peak, and average daily shipments are down 8.6% since then.

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More Trade, Fewer Carriers To Move It

Mexico accounted for $87.23 billion in two-way trade with the U.S. in May, ahead of Canada ($66.1 billion) and China ($32.6 billion) individually, and it accounted for 16.77% of the $520.06 billion in total U.S. trade with the world that month.

Year to date through May, Mexico has moved $404.57 billion with the U.S. — still ahead of Canada, China, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Laredo carried the weight of it. The port handled $36.33 billion in May, up 19.36% year over year, and more than the U.S. traded with all of China that month, from a single Texas port crossing.

Even isolating just the Mexico-bound portion of Laredo's trade, $35.29 billion, it still beats China's total. Roughly 97% of everything moving through Laredo is tied to Mexico.

Cabotage Is Cutting The Carrier Pool

Fewer carriers are legally cleared to move any of it. Mexican carriers can always haul freight across the border and back; that's not in question.

Cabotage is the violation: a carrier delivers a cross-border load, then keeps the truck running purely domestic U.S. freight instead of heading back. FMCSA counted 5,232 Mexican-domiciled carriers active in southern border commercial zones as of May 15, down from 5,467 in December and 5,633 in December 2024.

Bob Costello, ATA's chief economist, attributes the decline to renewed enforcement of English-language proficiency requirements, catching carriers that had, for years, assumed cabotage wasn't being closely monitored.

A Seized Lot, and the Policy Behind It

Danielle Chaffin, a trucking fraud investigator, posted a photo showing a Forza-marked trailer sitting in a fenced-off lot with 'SEIZED' signage.

Forza Transportation Services calls itself the largest nearshoring provider at Port Laredo, though the seizure's location, date, and cause aren't confirmed. However, the enforcement behind it is being increasingly confirmed.

DOT Secretary Sean Duffy told a Phoenix news station in June: "We're pulling the visas of those Mexican drivers who violate our rules... this is about making sure that American companies, American drivers have these jobs and these loads."

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott put it more bluntly: "We are committed to enforcing the law like never before."

The Cost Of Getting Caught

Roughly 3,200 Mexican drivers have had their B-1 visas revoked since January, according to the Nuevo Laredo Freight Carriers Association.

That's the recent, border-specific count; Canacar, Mexico's National Chamber of Freight Transportation, has cited a separate, full-year figure of roughly 20,000 Mexican drivers losing U.S. work visas between April 2025 and April 2026.

Losing the visa doesn't just end the illegal domestic run; it also ends the driver's legitimate cross-border authority. First offenses now carry a 6- to 12-month re-entry ban; repeat violations result in permanent removal.

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Freight fraud is now a multi-billion dollar problem operating at industrial scale.

Coordinated schemes. Compromised carrier inboxes. Identity theft, double-brokering, and cargo theft rings running simultaneously. The industry needs a shared accountability model where every party that touches a transaction stands behind their piece of it.

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 🌎 AROUND THE FREIGHT WEB

📉 More Trucking Companies Are Filing for Bankruptcy. Nine trucking and logistics firms filed for Chapter 11 in two weeks, taking 248 jobs down with them. Talon Logistics was one of them, a 40- to 50-truck drayage carrier that used California state vouchers to help purchase hydrogen trucks.

🚢 A Record Month, but No One's Relaxed. Port of LA just had its best June in 118 years. Its own director says shippers have stopped waiting for "perfect conditions" — tariffs and the Iran war's fuel costs made that impossible.

⛽ The U.S. Northeast Is About to Feel Canada's Refinery Shutdown. Irving Oil's Saint John plant supplies gas and diesel to the region, and it's going dark for maintenance from September to mid-November, right as fuel markets are already strained by the war in Iran.

🕵️ $1B Fraud Ring Suspect Extradited from Qatar. Abdullah Anwar was extradited from Qatar to face charges as one of 100 people named in a 2021 indictment tied to stolen electronics and cargo theft rings. The FBI says the broader network is linked to more than $1 billion in combined criminal losses over five years.

🔓 One Hacked ELD Could Take Down Your Fleet. OOIDA backed S4429 in a July 14 Senate letter, which would ban Chinese-made vehicle-tech components and let Commerce block other high-risk foreign tech. OOIDA's president cited a 2020 FBI bulletin warning that ELD flaws could let hackers steal data or spread malware fleet-wide unnoticed.

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😂 FREIGHT HUMOR

🎧 THE FREIGHT CAVIAR PODCAST

CEO and Owner of Best Express Inc., Salvador Munoz, joined Paul-Bernard Jaroslawski on the FreightCaviar podcast to discuss why Juárez is becoming a high-tech manufacturing hub, how cross-border trucking actually operates, why rising diesel costs have become a business killer, why the driver shortage is not just about finding drivers, and more.

Watch it on YouTube, or listen to the full episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.