Mexico’s López Obrador says Abbott’s costly border checks that snarled traffic were ‘despicable’

EL PASO — Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador on Monday slammed Texas Governor Greg Abbott over his stepped up inspections of commercial trucks at the border, which for 10 days disrupted trade and the supply chain between both countries.

“Legally they can do it, but it’s a very despicable way to act,” López Obrador said at his regular daily news conference, known as the mañanera. “I would say it’s chicanadas (half-baked) antics from the state government.”

López Obrador’s remarks were his first since the inspections began on April 6. Last Friday, Abbott, who is up for reelection in November, agreed to end the additional inspections on commercial vehicles after the governors of four Mexican states — Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas — announced they had reached security agreements with Texas.

López Obrador said the Mexican governors and Abbott did not have the authority to do so.

“With all due respect, states have no legal authority to do agreements with a foreign country,” the president said. “Instead of thinking — and I say this respectfully — ‘How will I fix the problem of inflation?’ He is politicizing and even violating international rights.”

Except for the state of Nuevo León, which said it was implementing new security checks inside its narrow border with Texas, none of the Mexican governors offered up any new security guarantees with Texas. Instead, they detailed their ongoing efforts to secure the border.

Abbott ordered the additional safety inspections after declaring that the Biden administration had failed the country when it comes to border safety. He has said DPS workers inspecting the commercial vehicles, limited to tire or light checks, would disrupt efforts to smuggle people and drugs across the border.

“What’s despicable is the ongoing crisis on our southern border, with millions of illegal immigrants from over 150 countries overrunning our border communities and overwhelming our law enforcement, that neither President Biden nor President López Obrador have stepped up to stop,” Abbott press secretary Renae Eze responded in a statement Monday.

“It’s time for President Biden to do his job and secure our border, and it’s time for President López Obrador to work with Texas and the U.S. to stop this flow of illegal immigration into our state and our country,” he said.

But the new checks — which were in addition to federal inspections — cost time and money as trucks idled for hours waiting to be processed. For days, Mexican truckers angered by the slow pace of inspections — most are paid by the number of loads they carry across the border — further disrupted traffic on some of the bridges with their own protest blockades.

Ray Perryman, president of the Waco-based economic research firm Perryman Group, estimates that the delays cost the U.S. $4.2 billion for the period from April 6 to April 15 based on the economic impact of previous border slowdowns, including in 2019.

Perryman said his group estimates Texas lost an estimated $470 million a day due to the slowdowns. He said his latest study was carried out as a public service and further details will be made public this week.

Mexico is Texas’ No. 1 trading partner. In 2021, there was more than $661 billion in trade between the U.S. and Mexico, according to U.S. Census data.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that there’s $1 million in trade crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every minute.

“So there’s no question that putting these unnecessary inspections in place, which resulted at the time in the drop in commercial traffic of up to 60 to 70 percent in some ports, was having a huge impact on the local community, on businesses, and that’s why so many people were so outspoken about it,” she said.

During news conferences with the four Mexican governors where the agreements were announced, Abbott railed against what he called Biden’s “open border” policies. And in addition to calling on López Obrador to do more to secure the border, he called for a stronger fight against organized crime, an endless battle for every Mexican president going back decades.

López Obrador dismissed Abbott’s actions as politics.

“I think the governor of Texas aspires to be a (2024 presidential) candidate for the Republican Party, and so he thinks that with this action he will win support, although it’s also damaging” to the economy, López Obrador said. “The purpose is to create conflict… something that Mexicans in Texas know all (too) well. But we will not be provoked.”

“It’s great that it has been resolved,” he added. “I just hope (Texas) will not act this way again. It doesn’t help them. … How can a person who aspires to be president of a great nation like the United States act this way? I just hope he doesn’t get mad, that he doesn’t lose his sense of humor.”

On Monday, commercial traffic was flowing normally across the 1,200-mile Texas-Mexico border. But while Abbott has ended his stepped-up safety inspections at the border, Texas is still giving migrants who cross into the U.S. free bus rides to the District of Columbia after they are processed by federal authorities and allowed to wait north of the border for their immigration court dates.

On Sunday, U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, applauded the governor’s order to bus migrants from Texas to Washington D.C., calling it “humanitarian.”

“Busing migrants to D.C. helps get them closer to their final destination and saves their sponsors travel costs,” she wrote on Twitter. “This is one of the most humanitarian policies Greg Abbott has ever enacted… I’ll take the poetic justice while we wait for real justice.”

Austin bureau chief Robert T. Garrett and special contributor Marisol Chavez contributed to this report.