Borderlands Mexico is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week: US trade with Mexico over $69 billion in April; Cold storage provider inks $15M deal with Texas grocery chain; and Hengli Hydraulics opens $325 million plant near Monterrey, Mexico.

Mexico was the top trading partner of the U.S. in April, with two-way commerce totaling $69.7 billion, a 4% year-over-year decline compared to April 2024.

It was the 16th consecutive month and 26th of the past 27 months that Mexico has been No. 1 in trade with the U.S.

Canada ranked No. 2 in trade at $56.6 billion in April. China ranked third at $33.6 billion, followed by Germany at $20.5 billion and Japan at $20.4 billion.

John F. Kennedy International Airport was the No. 1 international U.S. trade gateway in April, totaling $35.1 billion, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by WorldCity.

Chicago O’Hare International Airport was the second-ranked U.S. gateway for international trade at $30.2 billion during April.

Port Laredo, Texas, was the No. 3-ranked U.S. trade gateway in April, compared to the same month in 2024, when Laredo was the No. 1 gateway for trade. Trade in the month totaled $28.3 billion, a 3% year-over-year increase.

Officials for INRIX, a global provider of transportation data and analytics, said they are seeing positive trends for supply chain and vehicle movements between Mexico and the U.S.

INRIX recently launched Cross-Border Insights, a product designed to track activity between the U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico borders. The cross-border intelligence provided by INRIX aims to help investors analyze supply chains, assess policy impact, and forecast trade-driven risk.

Michael Cottle, vice-president of enterprise business at INRIX, said they are seeing an uptick in northbound vehicles to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“We noticed an uptick of northbound crossings compared to the past for passenger cars on the weekends,” Cottle told FreightWaves in an interview. “What we’re seeing is possibly with the softening of the dollar that products are now cheaper in the U.S., and so it’s led to retailers in those border towns staffing up to have more people there to accommodate the increased demand for shopping in the U.S.”

Kirkland, Washington-based INRIX was founded in 2004. The company processes location-based data — telemetry data from passenger and freight vehicles — into mission-critical transportation applications and intelligence.

“[The data] goes to logistics companies like Amazon and Trimble that do route calculation and manifest building,” Cottle said. “In the hedge fund world, we can tell you how many people visited T.J. Maxx yesterday across the country, or how many trucks went to a Caterpillar plant. That gives them a kind of early signal of what might be happening financially with those companies instead of having maybe a month’s delay in credit card data.”