Mexican truckers at the South Texas border have formed a blockade in protest of Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to have Texas Department of Public Safety Troopers inspect the trucks.
The news comes on the heels of Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Sid Miller asking Abbott to stop the unnecessary border inspections.
“This policy will hurt Texas and American consumers by driving up already skyrocketing food prices, worsening ongoing supply chain disruptions, causing massive produce shortages and saddling Texas and American companies with untold losses,” Miller said in a news release.
On Wednesday, Abbott agreed to scale back the inspections at the border crossing between Laredo and Nuevo Leon, following Gov. Samuel Alejandro Garcia Sepulveda's commitment to more inspections on the Mexican side of the border.
"I look forward to working with all of them toward achieving results similar to what we are achieving today with Governor Garcia," Abbott said at a press conference. "Until, however, those agreements are reached with those states, the Texas Department of Public Safety will continue to thoroughly inspect vehicles entering into the United States from every Mexican state except Nuevo Leon." The crossing from Nuevo Leon is the largest trucking port between Texas and Mexico.
On April 6, Abbott announced that Texas would charter buses to take migrants to Washington, D.C., “where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people they are allowing to come across our border."
The action was taken to “help local officials whose communities are overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants being dropped off by the Biden administration,” Abbott said. He would later state that boarding the buses would be done on a voluntary basis.
Abbott stated that invasive vehicle inspections would combat human smuggling and trafficking, which he called a “zero-tolerance policy for unsafe vehicles used for smuggling,” adding this would “dramatically slow traffic from Mexico into Texas.”
Mexican truckers entering Texas were seeing day-long wait times because of the enhanced inspections and in protest formed a blockade.
Abbott’s actions were deemed unnecessary by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol because it already inspects the trucks.