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There are 21,748 Canadian and Mexican-domiciled motor carriers registered with FMCSA to operate in the United States. Most of them are legitimate freight operators moving international cargo across borders that the American economy depends on. The Laredo Gateway handles more than $300 billion in annual trade. The supply chain connecting American manufacturing to Mexican maquiladoras and Canadian industrial corridors does not function without cross-border trucking. That reality is the baseline. It is also the reason the safety and enforcement data embedded in that population rarely receive the close look they deserve, because the economic dependency creates political pressure not to look too closely at what the numbers say.
The numbers on cross-border carrier intelligence say something that the political framing around this issue consistently obscures. The Mexican-domiciled carrier population, specifically the carriers domiciled in Tamaulipas, performs at a level that would not be tolerated in the domestic carrier population. And the financial consequences of tolerating it in the cross-border population are landing directly on American carriers, owner-operators, and drivers who compete against that labor market every day.
Start with the inspection data because it is the most straightforward measure. In the last 365 days, Mexican-domiciled carriers conducted 121,199 roadside inspections, resulting in 395,026 total violations. That is 3.26 violations per inspection. Over the same period, Canadian carriers conducted 51,703 inspections and issued 53,964 violations, for an average of 1.04 violations per inspection. The US domestic carrier baseline runs significantly below two per inspection. Mexican-domiciled carriers are running at more than three times the Canadian rate. That gap does not exist because of aggressive targeting. Enforcement personnel do not selectively target Mexican carriers with extra scrutiny at the roadside. The violations-per-inspection rate is what it is because of the actual condition of the equipment and the drivers being inspected.
Breaking it down further, of the 395,026 violations from Mexican carriers in the last year, 208,826 were vehicle violations and 36,383 produced vehicle out-of-service orders. Roughly one in six vehicle violations resulted in a truck being put out of service on the spot. Driver violations totaled 25,996, with 3,183 driver out-of-service orders. Hazmat violations totaled 1,853. Compare that to Canadian carriers, who generated 15,449 vehicle violations and 5,897 vehicle out-of-service orders from fewer total inspections, with 10,226 driver violations and 1,215 driver out-of-service orders.
Now look at where Mexican carrier risk is actually concentrated, because this is where the conventional narrative about border-crossing areas gets complicated.
The common assumption is that El Paso and Tijuana are the locus of cross-border trucking risk. That assumption is wrong according to the data. Tamaulipas-domiciled carriers, the corridor running from Nuevo Laredo through Reynosa to Matamoros along the Gulf Coast of Texas, represent 2,377 of the 5,901 Mexican carriers registered with FMCSA. For context, the second-highest Mexican state in the dataset is Sonora at 60.8, followed by Chihuahua at 52.6. The highest-scoring Canadian province in the dataset is Alberta, with a score of 37.2. The Tamaulipas average is nearly double Alberta’s and nearly double the US domestic baseline, which sits around 33 on the same model.
That is a structural difference and it has a geographic explanation that the data supports and that independent research confirms. States like Veracruz, Puebla, Nuevo Leon, Jalisco, and Tamaulipas together accumulated over 700 million Mexican pesos in damages linked specifically to heavy truck crashes in 2024. In states with heavy freight intensity like Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas, the share of human-factor-related crashes, including distraction, fatigue, improper overtaking, and loss of control, rises above 85 percent, and in some corridors above 90 percent.
Tamaulipas is also cartel territory. The Gulf Cartel and Cartel del Noreste have contested control of the Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa corridors for years. Members of an organized crime group set at least four trucks on fire in Reynosa in 2022 to pressure truckers to end a blockade of the Pharr international bridge, a demonstration of the degree to which organized crime directly influences commercial trucking operations in the state. The carriers domiciled in that environment, operating under those conditions, bring that operating environment with them when they cross into Texas.
The legal framework governing what these carriers are permitted to do on American roads is clear and has been since NAFTA. Cabotage refers to the transportation of property or passengers from point to point within a single country. Drivers may be admitted to deliver or pick up cargo traveling in the stream of international commerce, meaning the cargo is entering or leaving the United States. Movements not permitted include picking up a shipment at one US location and delivering that shipment to another US location. That prohibition is in the DHS guidelines published in 2012, in 49 CFR Section 365.501(b), and in 19 CFR Section 123.14(c). The law is not ambiguous. The enforcement is.
Using Mexican B-1 drivers to haul domestic loads is illegal and it is called cabotage, which is another reason the freight market has been under pressure. It’s happening a lot.
The economics driving cabotage violations are not subtle. A typical B-1 driver wage was about 27 cents per mile, roughly 35 cents adjusted for inflation in 2025. The American Transportation Research Institute estimated domestic carriers paid drivers 78 cents per mile on average in 2024. That is a 43-cent-per-mile labor arbitrage available to any carrier willing to violate federal cabotage law and dispatch a Mexican B-1 driver on domestic freight. A carrier running 10 trucks at 120,000 miles per year per unit captures approximately $5.1 million in labor cost savings annually relative to domestic wage rates. That is not a rounding error. That is a business model.
Its a business model that puts domestic carriers at a structural competitive disadvantage in the spot market. When a shipper or broker sources capacity and finds a rate offer 15 to 20 percent below the domestic market rate, that gap often stems from this arithmetic. American carriers, American owner-operators, and American drivers are competing against a labor cost structure that federal law prohibits but federal enforcement has historically failed to police.
The Texas Department of Public Safety petitioned FMCSA in December 2024 to amend 49 CFR Section 383.23 to remove the reciprocal recognition of Mexican and Canadian CDLs for intrastate commerce outside a driver’s domicile, requiring foreign CDL holders to obtain a non-domiciled CDL with proper work authorization. Under the current reciprocal status, Mexican or Canadian CDL holders can operate in intrastate commerce in the United States for a US-based motor carrier without a non-domiciled CDL or work authorization. That loophole is how a carrier avoids the non-domiciled CDL process entirely. Hire a driver with a Mexican LFC under an employment model that technically classifies them as a domestic worker, and the work authorization question evaporates.
The SAFER in Transport Act, with a companion bill introduced by Senator Todd Young in February 2026, calls for a memorandum of understanding between FMCSA and US Customs and Border Protection to improve enforcement of cabotage restrictions on foreign carriers. If that MOU gets executed, it would be the first formal coordination mechanism between the two agencies that currently operate in separate enforcement silos on this issue, one watching the border crossing and one watching the highway, with minimal information sharing between them on who went where after the initial crossing.
The Canadian side of the cross-border picture is different in character if not entirely benign. Canadian carriers have 1.04 violations per inspection, versus 3.26 for Mexican carriers. Their out-of-service rate of 6.46 percent is above the US domestic baseline of 3.36 percent but well below the Mexican carrier OOS rate of 10.02 percent. Canadian carriers are revoked at 2.2 times the US baseline rate, the highest revocation rate in the cross-border dataset. The Ontario carrier population of 7,804 registered carriers is the single largest provincial concentration and warrants its own examination, given the volume of Canada-US freight moving through that corridor. The crash prediction picture puts 21.7 percent of Canadian carriers in Critical or High tier, which is 1.2 times the US baseline, not alarming in isolation, but above average.
The 77 percent of Canadian carriers and 78 percent of Mexican carriers that operate fleets of five trucks or fewer are also worth noting. Cross-border carrier risk is disproportionately a small-fleet problem. Smaller fleets amplify the impact of individual incidents on safety scores and crash prediction models. A single-truck operator with two crashes is statistically worse than a 100-truck fleet with ten crashes. That is partly why the Tamaulipas numbers look as extreme as they do and why they require interpretation alongside the absolute counts.
What the cross-border carrier intelligence data does not do is draw conclusions about individual carriers. A Tamaulipas-domiciled carrier scoring Critical on crash prediction is not automatically an unsafe operator. The data shows population-level patterns. For individual carrier analysis, the Carrier Lookup page is the right tool. What the population-level data does do is tell shippers, brokers, insurers, and enforcement personnel where to focus scrutiny and what baseline expectations are reasonable before a carrier is selected to touch American freight or American highways.
The trucks are out there. The regulations governing what they are permitted to do are documented. The enforcement gaps are documented. The financial consequences for domestic operators competing against illegal labor arbitrage are real and quantifiable. The data to examine it all is now on one page.
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