The trade agreement that governs nearly $900 billion a year in U.S.-Mexico commerce is still in force.
What it no longer has is a guaranteed future.
On July 1, the three USMCA governments met for the agreement’s first mandatory six-year review. Mexico and Canada backed a new 16-year term. The United States did not, with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer stating that Washington would not renew the agreement in its current form. The pact stays in effect, but it now moves into annual reviews that can continue until its scheduled expiration in 2036, and a fourth round of U.S.-Mexico talks is set for Washington this month.
For companies that build, ship and sell across the border, the shift from a long runway to a year-to-year horizon is the story. Few regions feel it more directly than Texas.
The volume moving through the state has not slowed while negotiators talk. Laredo handled $35.3 billion in goods in May alone, keeping its place as the country’s busiest port for trade with Mexico. Total U.S.-Mexico trade that month reached $87.2 billion, up 17.1 percent from a year earlier. Over the 12 months ending in May, more than $361 billion crossed through Laredo. Freight trade between the two countries reached $872.8 billion in 2025, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
That is the economy Javier Loya grew up in. Born in El Paso, the second-youngest of seven children, Loya was raised in a household where his father worked at a Farah Manufacturing plant, one of the garment makers that once anchored the city’s industrial base. He went on to Columbia University, then built a career in energy and commodity markets that took him from a natural gas brokerage to co-founding OTC Global Holdings in 2007. Today he is Chairman of GETCHOICE! and Co-Chair of Bienvenido’s Empresarios, a coalition of Hispanic executives whose stated focus includes economic relations between the United States and Mexico.
That last role matters more this year than it has in some time. Bienvenido’s Empresarios describes its work as developing entrepreneurs, exposing young Hispanics to free-market ideas and advocating for productive bilateral relations. In May 2025, Loya joined more than 20 Hispanic business leaders from energy, manufacturing, finance, food and media for meetings at Republican National Committee headquarters and the White House. The coalition operates separately from partisan electoral activity, and its trade message is a business one: supply chains that took years to build do not reroute cleanly because of a policy cycle.
The open questions in the review are concrete. Reporting after the July round indicated the two sides remain apart on automotive content rules. Separate U.S. tariff actions under Sections 232, 301 and 338 have changed landed costs even where USMCA treatment still applies. Mexico’s economy minister has said roughly 85 percent of Mexican exports remain tariff-free because they meet the agreement’s rules of origin. The preferential channel is open, but only for companies that can document compliance, which pushes more work onto customs teams, suppliers and the small and midsize firms that feed larger manufacturers.
This is where Hispanic-owned businesses sit in the story, and why coalitions like Bienvenido’s Empresarios are paying attention. Much of the border economy runs through family-owned logistics companies, customs brokers, parts suppliers and service firms on both sides of the Rio Grande. They carry the compliance burden of every rule change without the legal departments of the multinationals they serve. Uncertainty for them does not show up as a headline. It shows up as a delayed expansion, a deferred hire or a warehouse lease that does not get signed.
Loya’s own career offers a useful lens on how markets respond to that kind of uncertainty. Commodity brokerage is a business built on pricing risk. Buyers and sellers can live with volatility when they can see it and hedge it. What they cannot price is a rulebook that may change every twelve months. A shorter review horizon does not end trade. It raises the cost of committing capital to it.
That distinction is the case Hispanic business leaders are likely to press as talks continue. Nearshoring has brought factories, jobs and freight volume into Texas border communities at a scale that has reshaped the region. Keeping that investment depends less on any single tariff line than on whether companies believe the framework will still be there when a new plant comes online.
For El Paso, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, that is not an abstract question of trade policy. It is the local economy. And for a coalition that counts executives like Loya among its leaders, the next round of negotiations should be judged by one practical test: whether it gives the businesses on the border something they can plan around.
