Four things happened to the Laredo lane in one week, and a carrier who only read one of them would get the wrong idea. On Monday, October 26, Mexico's freight carriers started a national strike over highway robbery and murdered drivers; by Tuesday it was over, with four negotiating tables and a promise that the trucks come back out if the government stalls. On Tuesday in Jacksonville, Knight-Swift chief executive Adam Miller told FreightWaves that he is "seeing the enforcement really ramp up on cabotage," that he has seen Mexican drivers lose visas over violations allegedly committed while working for a previous carrier, and that cross-border capacity is going to tighten. The same week Nuevo León's governor announced a 50 percent cut in the state fees at the Colombia crossing to draw more truck traffic there. And a filing surfaced in Texas for a $400 million Walmart distribution center on Interstate 35 northeast of San Antonio, construction starting in 2027. Fewer drivers, more freight, and two governments trying to steer where it crosses. That is the week.
48 hours of blockades, four tables, and a warning
Four trucking groups took part and negotiated the end of it: the National Chamber of Freight Transport, CANACAR, the Honorable Mexican Alliance of Transport Organizations (HAMOTAC), the Mexican-American Federation of Transporters (FEMATRAC) and the Organization for the Integration of Conventional Rights (INDECO). Mexico's Interior Ministry, Segob, counted demonstrations at 38 locations in 19 states, involving 691 vehicles and 858 participants; CANACAR said the movement reached all 32 states. The grievances were cargo theft, extortion, violence against drivers and operating costs. On Tuesday, October 27, after a meeting at Segob, the groups agreed to lift the blockades and suspend the protests in exchange for working tables with the federal agencies responsible for highway security, road infrastructure, taxation, and labor rules and social security. CANACAR president Augusto Ramos Melo said the industry, dominated by small operators, wants simplified social-security requirements and cheaper options for independent drivers, and will push for agreements with dates on them rather than open-ended talks. CANACAR representatives said 15 truck drivers have been killed in Mexico this year, three of them in Veracruz and two in San Luis Potosí. FEMATRAC's representative in Guanajuato, Irma Serrano, told La Silla Rota that the suspension is temporary and depends on commitments with deadlines.
We cannot continue to endure more highway robberies, more loss of property, more truck drivers murdered.
"Really ramp up": what one of the biggest truckload carriers is seeing at the line
Knight-Swift runs more than 26,000 tractors and 96,000 trailers, and it runs Mexico through TransMex, a Nogales-based subsidiary with more than 1,100 tractors and 3,000 trailers. Speaking to FreightWaves on October 27 at the WEX OTR Summit in Jacksonville, Miller said U.S. authorities have intensified scrutiny of Mexican drivers at the border, including reviewing possible cabotage committed for previous employers. "I've seen them take visas away from drivers from really a previous carrier, not even cabotage with our trucks, with our company," he said. Knight-Swift keeps strict rules on its own cross-border runs, he said, but the scrutiny will discourage some Mexican drivers from entering the United States at all: "I do feel like that type of capacity is going to get a little bit tighter as enforcement ramps up." He remains bullish on the lane over the long run because of nearshoring, and said some automotive customers have already adjusted their transportation strategies as tariff policy moves.
The mechanism behind Miller's observation has been building since spring. A B-1 driver is a Mexican national admitted on a business-visitor visa to move international freight: a load that crosses the border, in either direction. Hauling a load between two U.S. points is cabotage and has always been illegal. What changed is that the Transportation Department began sharing FMCSA inspection records with Customs and Border Protection, so a cabotage warning written at a roadside inspection or a weigh station now surfaces when the driver's visa is scanned at the port. Carriers say drivers often learn of a revocation only when they reach the booth. The Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce warned in April that hundreds of visas had been revoked and that reviews reached back several years; CANACAR's Nuevo Laredo delegate put the border-wide count at about 3,200 in May; CANACAR's broader estimate of all Mexican driver visa revocations, for any reason, between April 2025 and April 2026 is roughly 20,000; other CANACAR figures reported since run higher, and none is an official U.S. number. FMCSA's own count of Mexican carriers with authority to operate in the U.S. border commercial zones fell to 5,232 on May 15 from 5,467 on December 26, 2025, a 4.3 percent drop in under five months; the end-of-2024 count was 5,633. Cargado, a cross-border freight marketplace, says that among the carriers it has onboarded in Laredo more than two-thirds run majority B-1 fleets, more than 40 percent run no CDL drivers at all, and only about 8 percent run an all-CDL fleet. That is why the American Trucking Associations' chief economist, Bob Costello, said in July that the shrinkage is not an opportunity for U.S. fleets: border-zone carriers do the drayage across the line and hand the long haul to American trucks. He added that the drop "wasn't a huge number" and he did not expect much of a problem yet, while warning that a continued slide could lead to logistical issues.
The rule in one sentence, and the gray zone
A B-1 driver may haul a load that crosses the border as part of one international move and may not haul a load picked up and delivered inside the United States. The gray zone is everything a dispatcher asks for between those two: repositioning an empty trailer across town, a relay to a yard, a transload. CANACAR has asked CBP to define what counts as an irregularity and how a revocation is decided; CBP has not published enforcement totals or any look-back rule. CANACAR's position is that a driver on an international trip is compliant loaded or empty, but it has also reported officers treating an empty trailer as cargo. Until the agency writes it down, the conservative reading for a U.S. broker or carrier is that any domestic move by a B-1 driver, loaded or empty, can cost that driver the visa and your partner the driver.
Nuevo León's bet: half off at Colombia
Opening COMCE's foreign-trade congress in San Pedro Garza García, Governor Samuel García announced a 50 percent discount on the fees, "derechos," charged at the Colombia customs post, Líder Empresarial reported on October 28. The Nuevo León crossing feeds the Colombia-Solidarity International Bridge, an alternative to Laredo's bridges for freight between the two countries. FreightWaves describes the cut as applying to the additional state toll introduced on April 14, 2025, under García's administration and collected about 500 meters before the bridge's own tollbooth on the Mexican side, and reports that it does not touch tolls collected by the City of Laredo. "We are going to announce a 50 percent discount on all the fees at the Colombia customs and start multiplying the crossings, because that is what we want: exports, value added, jobs, talent," García said, by Líder Empresarial's account. He said daily crossings at Colombia rose from under 200 to about 8,500 during his term, cited a Texas Department of Transportation projection of 15,000 a day by 2030, and said the customs post brings the state about 5 billion pesos a year. For a carrier the question is whether a cheaper Colombia, with the extra road miles on both sides, beats the queue at World Trade Bridge on a given day.
And a $400 million reason the freight keeps coming
The demand side showed up in a state filing. Walmart is planning a $400 million distribution center in Cibolo, Texas, northeast of San Antonio, the San Antonio Express-News reported from a Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation filing. "Project Theo" is a 712,500-square-foot warehouse with a connected 31,933-square-foot office on about 126 acres at 3641 S. Santa Clara Road, construction starting in February 2027 and finishing in August 2029, with at least 425 full-time jobs above the San Antonio metro's median wage. Cibolo approved roughly $32.5 million in incentives, including a 75 percent property-tax abatement for ten years, and describes the building as a next-generation facility running robotics and automated handling. It sits on the Interstate 35 corridor that runs up from Laredo, near where it meets Interstate 10. Buildings like this are why Miller can say capacity will tighten and still be optimistic about the lane: the freight is not going anywhere, the drivers allowed to carry it across are.
What it means for a carrier running the lane
A short list for brokers, U.S. carriers and their Mexican partners
Ask your transfer partner two questions: how many of their drivers are on B-1 visas, and has any of them received a cabotage warning at a roadside inspection, even years ago and even at another company. The warning is now what triggers the revocation at the port.
Do not ask a B-1 driver to move anything between two U.S. points, including an empty trailer to a yard across town. Whether an empty counts is exactly what CANACAR wants CBP to define in writing; until then the conservative assumption is that it does.
Price for a slower handoff at Laredo through early 2027. Fewer border-zone carriers and fewer eligible drivers mean, in our reading, more dwell for the trailer on the Mexican side and more detention disputes on the U.S. side, not more loads for U.S. trucks.
Keep a contingency for the strike resuming. The suspension is explicitly conditional on dated commitments from the Mexican government, and the issue underneath it, drivers being robbed and killed, is not one a working table fixes in a month.
Run the Colombia math. Fifty percent off the state fees changes the bridge comparison for loads bound for I-35 north of Laredo; compare total cost including the extra kilometers and the wait at World Trade Bridge on your actual crossing days.
Two governments spent the week pulling in opposite directions on the same freight. U.S. enforcement is removing drivers who were doing the crossing and, through the data link between FMCSA and CBP, has made the flagging of old warnings automatic, in the account of CANACAR's Nuevo Laredo delegate. Nuevo León is discounting the crossing to attract more of the trucks. Mexico's carriers, caught in between and demanding protection from robbery on the way to the line, parked for two days to get a hearing. The freight itself did what freight does: Walmart filed plans for 712,500 square feet of it on the other end of Interstate 35. Our reading: capacity on this lane is no longer only a market. It is also a policy, and it is being set in three capitals at once.
Cross-border freight news for people who own the trucks
Qrylo follows the Laredo lane, visa and cabotage enforcement, Mexican trucking policy and the warehouses that drive the freight, in plain language, so a small carrier knows what the big fleets' border teams know. Buy, sell and read on qrylo.com.