The Texas Department of Agriculture is becoming increasingly worried about escalating attempts by migrants to block Mexican highways, concerned that demonstrations and caravans could considerably slow down U.S. supply chains, the Washington Examiner reported on Monday.
This is so because more than $400 billion worth of goods, which is the majority of all imports into Texas, arrive through the Mexico land border, according to the state comptroller's office.
The latest incident to raise alarm was Wednesday, when a group of hundreds of migrants ambushed a Mexican federal immigration facility in the southern state of Chiapas and demanded visas that would permit them to travel to the U.S., according to the Washington Examiner.
When Mexican National Guard troops confronted the group, the frustrated migrants descended on a nearby highway and refused to let traffic pass for some 30 hours.
"This is an insurrection of immigrants who aren't even ... citizens of Mexico, based on the reports we're all getting. They seem to be from Haiti and South America, southern Africa," Reb Wayne, spokesman for Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, told the Washington Examiner. "Given the rising tensions down there, it is something we're aware of and are concerned about."
Although Wayne said this incident apparently did not delay trade hundreds of miles north at the U.S. border, previous disruptions in traffic, including a protest by commercial truckers of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's implementation of truck inspections at the border, have resulted in millions of dollars in lost profits.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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