I grew up watching this border work. Customs brokers, truck drivers, plant managers in Nogales who move a continent's worth of goods and mostly do it right. This week almost every story I have touches them: a White House report that names Mexico as a channel for Chinese goods, an enforcement wave that will ask honest companies to prove what they have always known, fifty cancelled visas and what they say about who Washington no longer trusts, two Mexican athletes rewriting what is possible, and a 2028 presidential field that has never been made to answer for any of it.

First time reading? Join thousands of intellectually curious readers. Sign up here.

Separate from the newsletter this week

Arizona absorbs the Colorado River cuts while the Upper Basin walks. I wrote about why the fabs are not the problem, why housing is where this actually breaks, and the metric we are missing. Read it here.

// TRADE WINDS

We stopped paying attention and China did not

Mexico is the largest trading partner the United States has. That relationship was built by people I grew up with: customs brokers, truck drivers, plant managers in Nogales and Mexico who move a continent’s worth of goods every day and mostly do it right.

Last week the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy released a report on transshipment. There is a Trojan horse on the cover. Subtlety was not the goal.

The report names more than forty countries in what it calls a shadow transshipment network and estimates 19 to 26 billion dollars in tariff revenue lost every year. A separate Commerce figure puts roughly 67 billion dollars in goods routed from China through Mexico, India and Vietnam last year.

Its term for the worst offenders is “screwdriver factories.” Picture a warehouse near the border. A television arrives from China essentially finished, missing only its stand and its power cord. Two workers attach both, drop it in a box stamped hecho en México, and it crosses north at the USMCA tariff rate. Twenty minutes of labor bought a new nationality.

Here is what I want people to understand. This did not happen because Mexico got careless. It happened because we spent two decades treating our own hemisphere as an afterthought. China showed up. With subsidized capital, with raw materials priced below anything an American company could match, with state owned firms that never answer to a quarterly earnings call. We showed up with lectures and a trade agreement we barely enforced.

An American manufacturer trying to invest in Mexico is not competing against a Mexican company. It is competing against a treasury.

The fix is not punishing our neighbor. It is finally competing for our own neighborhood. That is the work we do every day at Intermestic Partners, and it is overdue.

Sources: White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, “The Great Transshipment Scam,” August 13, 2026; U.S. Department of Commerce; The Hill

// FROM MY WALLS

NO. 001

They spent eleven months and never caught him

I keep coming back to how often this region produces enormous numbers attached to nothing recoverable. After Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico in March 1916, Pershing took an expedition into Chihuahua and stayed nearly a year. They came home without him. Villa died in Parral in 1923, in his car, having already made peace with the government that had hunted him. His portrait hangs in my office in Phoenix for a reason.

ARCHIVAL POSTER  |  18 x 24  |  $25  |  SHIPS IN 5 TO 7 DAYS

Shop the collection, $25

// POLITICAL ARENA

Somebody has to ask them

The 2028 Democratic field is taking shape and almost nobody on the list has ever run a port of entry, negotiated with a Mexican governor, or watched a produce truck sit six hours in a line that costs somebody money every minute.

The Washington Post’s latest ranking runs long: Ossoff, Moore, Warnock, Harris, Newsom, Shapiro, Ocasio-Cortez, Buttigieg, Pritzker, Beshear, Booker, Slotkin, Murphy, Emanuel, Khanna. One Arizonan makes it, Mark Kelly, a senator from a state where the border is not an abstraction and where the largest trading partner is Mexico.

Here is my worry. Democrats just voted to put South Carolina first in the 2028 nominating calendar. No border state sits anywhere near the front of it. Which means a candidate can win this nomination without ever facing a serious question about the relationship that moves more goods than any other we have.

So let us ask them. Four questions, every candidate, on the record.

Trade. The USMCA joint review is here. What do you want changed, and what will you defend?

The border as infrastructure. Ports of entry are commercial arteries, not just enforcement lines. Will you fund the officers and the lanes?

Workforce. What is your plan for legal labor pathways that employers on both sides can actually use?

Mexico. How do you rebuild security cooperation without pretending the last six years did not happen?

Border governors understand this. Border members of Congress understand this. Presidential candidates rarely do, because nobody makes them.

Forty million of us are connected to Mexico. We are not a turnout problem to be solved in October. Give us policy worth showing up for, and watch what happens.

// POWER MOVE

The origin audit is coming for everyone

A plant manager in Guadalajara asked me a question last year that I have not stopped thinking about. He said: if someone shows up and asks me to prove where this steel came from, how far back do I have to go?

Nobody had ever asked him that before. Everybody is about to.

That is the shift underneath all of this. For thirty years, cross border manufacturing ran on relationships and paperwork assembled after the fact. A broker vouched for you. A certificate got signed. It worked because nobody was really checking.

Now the audit is the business model. And the companies that survive it will not be the ones with the best lawyers. They will be the ones who can answer in an afternoon.

I am working with technology platforms that put an entire operation on one dashboard: raw materials, hiring, inventory, movement, transit, cargo, expiration, process. Retailers in Mexico already run thousands of locations this way, every SKU and every shift visible in real time. The architecture transfers directly to a maquiladora floor. It turns origin from a question you dread into a report you run on a Tuesday.

What I am seeing already is encouraging. Companies tightening who they hire, documenting their floors, taking self audit seriously before anyone forces them to. Not enough of them. But the ones moving now are buying something their competitors cannot get later at any price: the ability to prove it.

At Intermestic Capital we back the clean version of this. Solar powered cobalt processing in Yuma, traceable from the ground up.

// BORDER BUZZ

Fifty cancelled visas and a warning

I ran a workforce of sixty thousand people at Customs and Border Protection. A visa is not a small thing. Revoking one is a deliberate act by the United States government, and it is almost never done loudly.

So the pattern this year deserves attention. More than fifty Mexican political figures, most of them from the governing Morena party, have quietly lost their U.S. visas. Separately, federal prosecutors in New York brought a case in April against ten current and former Mexican officials, including the sitting governor of Sinaloa. And now the visa of Andrés López Beltrán, son of the former president and a senior figure in Morena, has been pulled.

The Mexican government’s answer has been that this is an attack on sovereignty. It is not. López Beltrán holds no government post. He has not been charged with a crime in Mexico. The United States is not obligated to explain a visa decision, and it has not explained this one. What we are watching is a country signaling, without saying so, that it no longer trusts a set of people close to power.

I take no pleasure in this. Mexico is where I was born. But I am not going to soften it either. For years, serious reporting has tracked allegations of criminal money moving toward Mexican political campaigns, and the response from the top was to insist there was nothing to examine. You cannot govern a country by declining to look.

Forty million+ of us in this country are tied to Mexico by blood and by business. We need a Mexico whose institutions can be trusted. Right now, the clearest signal about those institutions is coming from a consular window.

// PLAYING FIELD

Two Mexicans nobody saw coming

I have been in rooms where somebody explains, patiently, why a Mexican kid is a long shot in a sport that was not built for him. I have stopped arguing. The results argue better.

In July, Isaac del Toro won stage 2 of the Tour de France in Barcelona, only the second Mexican in history to win a Tour stage. He finished third overall, the first Mexican ever on the final podium, and took the young rider classification. He is 22. Last year he came within a day of winning the Giro d’Italia. This season he also won the UAE Tour and Tirreno Adriatico outright.

Then Noel León, 21, from Monterrey, rookie season in Formula 2 with Campos Racing. On July 26 he won the Budapest feature race from third on the grid, his second win of the year. He restarts at Monza in September sitting fifth in the championship. He came up through Mexican F4, then the United States F4 title, then Euroformula, and he races under Escudería Telmex Telcel, the program that has been finding and funding Mexican drivers for more than twenty years.

That last part matters. No public federation built these careers. Private programs did, one driver at a time, because somebody decided to go look.

That is exactly the argument for the youth work I do in Arizona. Talent is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. Somewhere right now there is a kid in Nogales with that same engine and no track to run it on.

Find them earlier.

Never miss a beat from headlines to deep dives.

Thanks for reading Power Courier by Marco Lopez! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now