More Than 1,000 Mexican Carriers Held Authority to Operate in US Before Border Opened

This story appears in the Jan. 19 print edition of Transport Topics.

Contained in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s announcement of permitting Mexican carriers to run in the United States was a report that showed about 1,000 Mexican carriers already have longhaul operating authority here.

The report said about 260 of the 1,000 are “certificate” carriers with authority to operate in the U.S. before the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994.

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Others are known as “enterprise” carriers. They are DOT-registered, Mexican-owned carriers that must be domiciled in the United States and run longhaul under a program that stipulates they can carry only international cargo.

Types of Operating Authorities for Mexican Carriers Operating in the U.S.

The “enterprise” agreement was an attempt to comply with the Nafta provision that the United States open the border, President George W. Bush said in an order he signed creating the program in 2001.

Enterprise carriers can hire either U.S. commercial driver license holders or Mexican drivers with a Licencia Federal de Conductor and a U.S. work visa, the report said.

The “enterprise” program was created before DOT set up the Mexican truck pilot program that began in 2011 and ended last October.

“I was shocked by the number of enterprise carriers and the fact that DOT was robustly using this authority,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), ranking Democrat onthe House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told Transport Topics last week.

“It was a backdoor way to avoid the serious scrutiny of the pilot projects,” said DeFazio, a longtime critic of the Nafta treaty provision.

DeFazio said the “scale and the scope of the enterprise carrier authority was not made known to Congress” until DOT’s Inspector General included the figures in its December 2014 report on the pilot program.

Now that the pilot has ended, the remaining participants — 13 of the original 15 carriers — have been given operating authority to run longhaul here. Those pilot alumni are Mexican-owned and domiciled.

During the three-year life of the pilot program, the participants made trips across the border in a total of 55 trucks, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

During the same three years, 3,892 trucks owned and operated by the “certificate” and “enterprise” carriers crossed the border, FMCSA said.

The agency also said that during the three-year pilot with its 15 carriers, 351 Mexican-owned carriers received their authority to operate here under the enterprise program.

In opening the border, DOT said “certificate” and “enterprise” carriers “operate substantially the same” as the carriers in the pilot program did. 

There is a third category of Mexican-owned trucks — in addition to the approximately 1,000 enterprise and certificate carriers — that have operating authority in the U.S.

However, these Mexican-owned carriers, known as “commercial zones,” do not have longhaul operating authority. The Mexican-owned carriers must, like those in the enterprise category, be headquartered in the U.S. and transport only “international freight into, and operate solely within, the municipalities and commercial zones of those municipalities along the U.S.-Mexico border,” the FMCSA report said.

The states with the commercial zones are California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.

There are approximately 7,500 carriers that have “commercial zone” registration that allows them to travel up to approximately 20 miles into the United States, at which point their cargo is usually transferred to a U.S. carrier. This commercial zone program was begun years before Nafta and FMCSA were created.

Roadside Inspection Violation and Out-of Service Rates for Mexican and U.S & Canadian Carriers, By Carrier Type, Oct. 14, 2011- Oct. 10, 2014