The border operating system behind US / Mexico trade

Nearshoring usually gets described in factory language: plants, suppliers, industrial parks, labor pools, rail yards, and highway corridors. That is the visible part of the US / Mexico trade story.

Underneath sits the operating layer that lets the goods actually move. Customs brokers, freight forwarders, border drayage operators, cross-docks, warehouses, in-bond and FTZ specialists, compliance teams, and the software that keeps a shipment’s documents, release status, and delivery promise aligned. From the outside it looks administrative, so it is easy to underestimate. It functions as one of the control points of North American trade.

In 2025, US goods trade with Mexico was $871.6 billion: $337.3 billion of US exports to Mexico and $534.3 billion of imports from Mexico (US Census). BTS’s TransBorder Freight Data puts US / Mexico freight at $872.8 billion in 2025, up 3.9% from 2024 (BTS). Trucks carried 73.6% of that value, and Laredo alone handled $296.2 billion of US / Mexico truck freight.

Far from a small professional-services niche attached to the border, this is the workflow layer underneath one of the largest goods-trade lanes in the world.

What the customer actually buys

The clean industry label is customs brokerage. The customer problem is messier.

An importer or exporter needs the goods classified, documented, manifested, released, transported, staged, sometimes inspected, sometimes stored, and then delivered into a production or distribution schedule. The work touches two customs systems, multiple carriers, security programs, duty and tariff exposure, government-agency rules, and border dwell time.

So the best businesses in this market look like bundles rather than pure filing shops.

Segment	What the customer is really buying	Economic character
US customs brokerage	Entry filing, classification, duty/tariff handling, agency coordination, compliance advice	Sticky, expertise-driven, fee-based
Mexican customs brokerage	Pedimentos, despacho, licensed agent interface, local customs execution	More license-constrained, succession-sensitive
Freight forwarding	Carrier booking, routing, consolidation, document management	Spread/fee mix, volume and rate-cycle exposed
Cross-border trucking and drayage	Border handoffs, trailer interchange, short-haul execution, status control	Operationally intense, capacity and dwell sensitive
Warehousing and cross-dock	Storage, transload, inspection staging, in-bond/FTZ support	Utilization and throughput driven
Managed compliance and visibility	Audit support, exception management, document workflows, customer portal	High-retention wedge when it reduces mistakes

Official US market data confirms the scale and shows why precision is hard. The best official revenue anchor is NAICS 488510, “freight transportation arrangement,” which had $134.9 billion of receipts in 2022 across 17,130 firms and 23,482 establishments (2022 Economic Census). That category includes freight forwarding and other arrangement services, so it runs broader than customs brokerage alone. General warehousing and storage added another $42.2 billion of 2022 receipts. Long-distance truckload, LTL, and specialized trucking were much larger again.

Careful with the framing. The official buckets around brokerage, forwarding, trucking, and storage overlap, they are all large, and customers buy them together, so no single line reads cleanly as “the customs brokerage market.”

The US side is open, but still fragmented

The US license regime runs more open than Mexico’s. The market stays highly local anyway.

CBP’s May 2026 permitted customs broker list had 2,516 filer-code rows. The geography clusters. California had 556, Texas 514, New York 362, and Florida 286. Normalizing city names in the CBP file, Laredo alone had 218 rows, followed by Miami with 123. San Diego, Houston, Doral, El Paso, Nogales, and Brownsville all show up as meaningful nodes (CBP).

Treat that count as shape, not share. A filer-code row says nothing about revenue, entry volume, customer quality, or whether the broker is a scaled enterprise platform or a small local specialist. What it does show is the competition: many licensed firms clustered around ports, border crossings, airports, and customer niches.

The paired-border map sharpens the point. In the current public files, Laredo has 218 CBP permitted-broker rows and Nuevo Laredo has 220 active ANAM office rows. El Paso has 37 CBP rows and Ciudad Juarez has 41 ANAM office rows. San Diego, the public-file proxy for Otay Mesa, has 48 CBP rows versus 30 ANAM office rows in Tijuana. Read the counts as capacity clustering in a few crossings.

Fragmentation creates opportunity and risk together. A roll-up can look attractive on paper. In practice, the operating knowledge is local and procedural: port relationships, customer-specific classification history, document discipline, release timing, exception handling, and the broker’s compliance record. The license comes with a habit system, and the habit system is what you are actually buying.

Mexico’s license regime is the sharper bottleneck

Mexico is the tighter supply-side constraint.

The shorthand version is that Mexican customs broker licenses are scarce and often family-held. That points in the right direction. The law is more specific.

Current Mexican customs law makes the agente aduanal patent personal and non-transferable. The 2025 reform added a 20-year term, possible 20-year renewal, a three-year certification requirement to keep the patent active, and Consejo Aduanero review for patent grant, renewal, suspension, cancellation, and extinction (Ley Aduanera). The 2026 customs-law regulation then added more Consejo Aduanero operating detail and publication obligations for disabled, suspended, canceled, or extinguished agents and agencies (Reglamento).

New patents require a government call, Mexican nationality, a professional title, more than five years of customs experience, tax compliance, knowledge and psychotechnical exams, and Council determination. A private sale creates no supply here, the way it might for a normal business license.

Succession runs through a process too. For customs agencies, Article 167-K lets an agency designate two active customs representatives or management partners who meet Article 159 requirements to compete for the patent when an incorporated agent dies, retires, or becomes permanently incapacitated. The winner comes out of the evaluation. In practice, that still favors insiders with operating history and agency backing. Legally, the patent moves through a competition.

The 2026 implementation details harden the constraint. The Reglamento gives the Consejo Aduanero monthly ordinary sessions, extraordinary urgent sessions, quorum rules, majority voting, and a case-file process. SHCP’s March 2026 lineamientos then tell customs authorities how to submit patent, agency, suspension, cancellation, extinction, and other authorization matters to the Council. New patent supply flows through a public call and Council-review process tied to authority-identified operating needs. The market does not clear it privately.

The count itself needs careful language. ANAM’s current public office directory PDFs show 815 active customs-office rows across 41 office PDFs. The largest office count is Nuevo Laredo with 220, followed by AICM with 122 and Veracruz with 84. A separate ANAM agency roster dated June 2025 shows 1,086 unique patent numbers represented across 1,778 sociedades (ANAM).

Those two figures measure different things. Read them as roughly 800 active office rows in the current public office directory, and about 1,100 unique patent numbers represented in the 2025 agency roster. Either way, the Mexican side stays far more constrained than a typical fragmented services market.

Carmi is the archetype

Carmi Logistics shows what a real mid-market platform looks like in this corridor.

Carmi describes itself as a Mexico, US, and Canada logistics and customs provider with freight forwarding, US customs brokerage, Mexican customs brokerage, warehouse/logistics, land, air, ocean, LCL/FCL, in-bond shipments, and technology services. The company’s public history starts with a Mexican customs broker patent in Queretaro in 1983, then a Laredo forwarding company in 1984, and US customs brokerage through Carmi USA LLC since 2007. It also lists CTPAT, OEA, ISO 9001:2015, and IATA credentials (Carmi).

In the ANAM 2025 roster, “GA CARMI, S.C.” appears with six agent rows. Larger platforms exist. DICEX publicly claims 16-17 patents and appears as the largest sociedad by rows in the ANAM roster (DICEX). NAD Global says it has seven own patents and 15 own offices in Mexico plus three in the US (NAD Global). GOMSA advertises a similar integrated bundle of customs brokers, freight, land transportation, warehousing/distribution, insurance, and logistics management (GOMSA).

Treat Carmi as illustrative rather than singular. A credible cross-border operator tends to combine several things that outsiders often analyze separately:

• Licensed customs capacity.
• Border geography, especially Laredo.
• Freight forwarding and carrier relationships.
• Warehousing or cross-dock control.
• Security and quality credentials.
• Customer-facing workflow technology.
• A long operating history that gives customers confidence when things go wrong.

The bundle is the product. Any one piece alone falls short.

Two local samples round out the pattern. In Laredo, CBP lists 3P Customs Consultants as a permitted broker, while Hepeca’s public contact page ties the broker to a Laredo main office and distribution center, a southbound warehouse, and a Nuevo Laredo agency counterpart. In El Paso, CBP lists Cordova Brokerage International as a permitted broker; the company describes customs brokerage, in-bond warehousing, cross docking, freight forwarding, ABI tracking, EDI, CTPAT certification, and more than 80,000 square feet of warehouse space. Those are smaller local versions of the same bundle Carmi runs at a broader mid-market level.

The economics are three businesses at once

A customs-and-logistics platform earns a sticky customer relationship. The margin profile across its parts varies.

Customs brokerage is the best part of the business when it is well run. The inputs are expertise, process, software, and liability control. Customers stay, because switching brokers can disrupt classification history, document workflows, and compliance accountability. Scale matters once the provider can automate repeat entries, document intake, status updates, billing, and exception queues.

Expeditors is the cleanest public proxy for scaled asset-light brokerage and forwarding exposure. In its 2025 10-K, customs brokerage and other services accounted for approximately 39% of total revenues (Expeditors annual reports). That figure comes from a global public company, not a single border broker. It shows that customs and adjacent services can be a major, resilient part of an asset-light logistics model.

Transportation behaves differently. A platform carries it because customers want execution rather than advice, and it runs more cyclical and spread-driven. Public truck-brokerage proxies show the pressure. RXO reported Q4 2025 brokerage gross margin of 11.9% and adjusted EBITDA margin of 1.2% (RXO). C.H. Robinson’s North American Surface Transportation segment reported Q4 2025 adjusted gross profit margin of 14.6% and full-year 2025 operating income of $621.8 million on $11.56 billion of revenue (C.H. Robinson).

Warehousing and contract logistics behave differently again. They stabilize the customer relationship and give the provider physical control, and they demand labor, space, process discipline, and utilization. GXO reported $13.2 billion of 2025 revenue and $881 million of adjusted EBITDA, a roughly 6.7% adjusted EBITDA margin (GXO).

So the best cross-border platforms run a portfolio of economics at once: brokerage for sticky compliance revenue, freight for execution and wallet share, and warehousing/cross-dock for physical control.

What makes a good operator

The market is large enough that almost every logistics company can tell a growth story. Durability is the harder thing to build. Five tests separate the durable operators.

Start with licensed capacity. On the Mexico side, the patents and agency structure matter. On the US side, the filer-code footprint and port competence matter. Licenses are table stakes.

Exception handling comes next, and it separates the field. Border logistics throws exceptions constantly: missing documents, classification questions, inspections, release timing, dwell, carrier handoffs, trailer availability, customer appointments, and changing tariff or enforcement rules. Customers remember the provider that keeps working when the shipment goes sideways.

Then data discipline. The valuable software reduces manual exceptions: documents captured once, classification decisions reused, shipment status visible, release and delivery events tied together, and billing aligned to the actual work performed. A portal for its own sake earns nothing.

Cross-border trust is the fourth test. CTPAT, OEA, ISO, and similar credentials carry weight here. They signal that the provider understands security, process, auditability, and customer risk.

Succession is the fifth, and Mexico’s agent regime makes it strategic. A business built around one aging patent holder is a fragile asset. An agency with repeatable management, trained representatives, documented process, and a credible path through the current legal regime is a durable one.

The investable thesis

The investable unit is a corridor-specific operating system for regulated goods movement, wider than any single broker.

That is why the market can be both fragmented and defensible. Fragmentation comes from local ports, family-held agencies, customer niches, and the long tail of small brokers. Defensibility comes from licenses, compliance history, customer trust, border know-how, and the switching cost of moving sensitive trade workflows to a new provider.

Nearshoring should increase the volume and complexity of the work. Volume alone will not make every provider better. The winners will be the operators that can combine licensed customs capacity, practical border execution, physical staging, and clean data. The losers will keep adding shipments while their exceptions pile up.

That is the core lens for this market. Look past the broker label. Look for the company that can make the border feel less like a border to the customer.

Sources

The core sources for this piece are US Census goods trade with Mexico; the BTS 2025 TransBorder Freight annual report; CBP’s permitted customs broker listing; ANAM’s agents directory and 2025 agency roster; Mexico’s Ley Aduanera and Reglamento de la Ley Aduanera; Carmi, DICEX, NAD Global, GOMSA, and Livingston company materials; and public-company margin proxies from Expeditors, RXO, C.H. Robinson, and GXO.