Number One Port in America: The Trucks That Never Stop
Near Laredo, Texas
Look at the line of trucks ahead of you. On any given weekday, roughly ten thousand northbound commercial trucks cross the international bridges at Laredo into the United States. Ten thousand.
Day after day, the engines idle and the paperwork moves, carrying automobile parts from Monterrey, electronics from Guadalajara, produce from Sonora. This city handles more trade by dollar value than any other port in the United States. Not Los Angeles.
Not New York. Not Houston. Laredo, a border city of fewer than three hundred thousand people in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, moved roughly three hundred and forty billion dollars in goods in the year two thousand and twenty-four.
That surpassed the Port of Los Angeles for the first time that year, making Laredo officially the number one port of entry in the nation. The engine of this volume is the World Trade Bridge, which opened on April fifteenth of two thousand, built for one hundred and twenty-eight million dollars specifically because the explosive growth in cross-border commerce following the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in nineteen ninety-two had overwhelmed the old downtown bridges. Trucks were backed up for miles through city streets, waiting for a single commercial lane on the old bridge.
The World Trade Bridge opened with eight lanes of commercial traffic and room to grow. The trade that flows through here is not abstraction. About one-third of all jobs in Laredo, from customs brokers to warehouse workers to truck mechanics, are connected in some way to what crosses that river.
The crossing is the city.
