You’ve probably stopped waiting for the market to “normalize.”
Smart move.
The freight cycle that carriers and brokers are grinding through right now doesn’t follow the old rules, where capacity and demand would swing, correct, and swing again in patterns you could plan around.
What’s driving volatility now comes from outside the industry. Tariff announcements that flip your rate projections overnight. Border enforcement that turns a reliable lane into a bottleneck. Election-year trade policy that treats your freight as a political football. These forces have made domestic trucking inseparable from geopolitics, and they’re not going away.
Yet cross-border freight with Mexico and Canada has become a strategic answer to that instability. Shippers are flat out pulling supply chains closer to home, and the numbers reflect it:
- Mexican exports to the U.S. jumped 12% year-over-year through September 2025.
- U.S.-Canada lanes have held steady, anchored by commodity flows even as manufacturing softened.
- Meanwhile, the Cass Freight Shipments Index showed domestic volumes down 7.37% year-over-year through November.
Ultimately? The freight market isn’t what’s volatile. It’s the world we live in.
Why North American Freight Is Now Politically Exposed
For decades, running a trucking operation meant tracking loads, managing capacity, and watching fuel prices. You could build a business around those fundamentals. But now? You need a subscription to political news just to forecast next quarter.
The forces rattling cross-border freight and domestic lanes alike originate outside the industry. Trade negotiators, lawmakers, and enforcement agencies now hold as much sway over your margins as shipper demand does. Domestic freight can no longer be analyzed in a vacuum when a policy announcement in Washington or a diplomatic spat with Ottawa can change your rate outlook overnight.
Three forces have pulled trucking into the geopolitical spotlight:
- Trade Agreements and Disputes (USMCA): The USMCA was supposed to lock in stability for North American freight. On paper, it does. But political pressure to renegotiate or exit the deal has mounted ahead of its 2026 review, and 2025 saw new tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports that bypassed the agreement’s intent entirely.
- Election-Year Policy Risk: The 2024 election brought an administration that moved fast on trade and border policy. Early 2025 saw 25% tariff announcements on imports from Mexico and Canada, steel and aluminum duties, and what industry economists called “drinking out of a fire hose” of changes. Now, with the midterms on the horizon, carriers must run “what if” scenarios on political outcomes.
- Shifting Enforcement Priorities: Regulators tightened English proficiency requirements for drivers in 2025 and froze new work visas for foreign drivers. Texas ramped up safety inspections on Mexico-bound trucks. Canada adjusted its own labor and emissions enforcement. A single visa restriction or state-level inspection push can create bottlenecks overnight, completely detached from freight demand.
USMCA: Stability on Paper, Uncertainty in Practice
The USMCA was supposed to fix this. When it replaced NAFTA in 2020, carriers finally got a genuine framework for cross-border freight: tariff-free movement, clearer rules of origin, and predictable north-south lanes.
The framework held up. The predictability didn’t.
Now the agreement’s 2026 joint review has become a pressure cooker. U.S. officials have floated scrapping the USMCA entirely for bilateral deals. Mexico and Canada are hedging by courting other trade partners. And late 2025 brought a 25% tariff on non-U.S. content in Mexican-assembled trucks, adding nearly $10,000 per rig. The treaty’s text never changed. Carriers got blindsided anyway.
That’s the reality now: The rules are stable, but the results aren’t. You can read the agreement and know what should happen. You just can’t know what will.
This uncertainty actually explains why cross-border freight keeps expanding. Shippers aren’t chasing easy growth. They’re hedging risk by anchoring supply chains closer to home, leaning on the USMCA’s framework while bracing for its fragility.
Mexico and Canada: Anchors in an Uncertain System
The USMCA’s fragility raises an obvious question: If the framework can’t guarantee stability, what can?
For carriers weathering domestic volatility, the answer increasingly runs north and south. U.S. freight with Mexico and Canada topped $1.6 trillion in 2024 and kept climbing through 2025.
But the growth story misses the point.
These lanes feel steadier because they’re deeply embedded in North American manufacturing. They serve factories, not spot boards. They run on production schedules and long-term contracts, not load-to-load speculation. And they are supply chains that have been optimized for decades, before the word “optimize” was even widely used.
Mexico: The Production Engine
Nearshoring put that principle into overdrive. Mexico became the largest U.S. trading partner by value as manufacturers pulled production closer to home, and the freight followed. Mexican exports to the U.S. jumped to $653 billion year-to-date by September 2025, easily outpaced any other country, and showed no signs of slowing.
The difference between Mexico freight and domestic spot loads comes down to what’s on the trucks. North-south lanes move intermediate goods and components feeding U.S. assembly lines. A parts shipment from Monterrey to Ohio runs on a production schedule. Consumer spending can dip. Retail can slow. That truck still rolls because the factory needs it tomorrow morning.
Challenges exist, sure. Cargo theft spiked in 2025. Laredo, handling 40% of the truck trade, groaned under congestion. But carriers with Mexico exposure kept seeing baseline volume when domestic rates bottomed out.
Production freight doesn’t disappear with a soft quarter.
Canada: The Quiet Workhorse
Canada doesn’t grab headlines like Mexico, but the northern border moves over $900 billion in annual trade in both directions. Automotive, energy, and agriculture dominate, and these flows have been integrated for generations.
A car assembled in Ontario contains roughly 50% U.S.-made parts. Those components cross the border multiple times during production. The choreography continues whether the economy runs hot or cold. Energy shipments tied to long-term contracts keep moving. Agricultural commodities and building materials maintain baseline demand that doesn’t evaporate with rate swings.
Canadian lanes won’t always deliver explosive growth but offer something arguably more challenging to find: consistency.
The Broader Hemisphere Matters Too: Venezuela and Energy Risk
Mexico and Canada anchor your freight. But stability depends on factors far beyond your lanes.
Anyone and everyone knows about the shock U.S. invasion of Venezuela and subsequent arrest of dictator Nicolás Maduro to kick off 2026. However, the story for carriers goes deeper than regime change.
A trucking company in Pittsburgh or Poughkeepsie will never haul a load to Caracas, but political upheaval in Venezuela can still wreck that carrier’s margins through diesel prices alone. Late 2025 had already proven the point when Venezuela plunged deeper into turmoil and diesel crack spreads spiked to their highest levels since early 2024. Carriers across North America felt global risk locally, whether they wanted to or not.
- Energy Market Exposure: Venezuelan crude is heavy and sulfurous, exactly what U.S. Gulf Coast refineries need to produce diesel. When Venezuela’s supply gets disrupted by sanctions or conflict, suitable crudes become scarce, and diesel production tightens. Analysts warned that persistent disruptions could “reverberate throughout global and U.S. energy prices,” with trucking disproportionately exposed.
- Fuel Cost Volatility: A sudden diesel spike acts like a tax on your operation. Smaller fleets without fuel surcharges take the hit directly. Larger carriers face nervous shippers who start questioning surcharge structures. Some projections put U.S. diesel at $3.50 per gallon in 2026 if Venezuelan exports resume, but any reversal could send prices climbing again.
- Sourcing and Trade Flow Aftershocks: Political instability forces sourcing changes. When one country’s exports get cut off, importers pivot to alternatives and create unexpected demand on different lanes. A mineral shortage in South America might suddenly spike flatbed demand for Canadian or domestic alternatives. The freight finds a way, but it rarely follows the same path twice.
How Uncertainty Hits the Ground
Global headlines make for interesting reading. But carriers live with the fallout in load boards, dispatch decisions, and margin pressure that doesn’t show up in policy summaries. The confusion compounds day after day, and it exposes which operations can handle complexity and which ones were barely holding together in calmer times.
Where the Confusion Shows Up
Demand signals just don’t make sense anymore. One month brings a surge as shippers race to beat a tariff deadline. The next brings silence while inventories rebalance. Think back to December 2024: cross-border freight value jumped 6% year-over-year, then dropped 6% from the prior month as shippers tried to get ahead of the new administration’s trade policy.
Hurry up, then wait.
That unpredictability has played out across lanes, too. Northbound Mexico-to-U.S. freight held strong through 2025 while southbound lanes weakened. Fewer auto parts heading into Mexico left trucks underloaded and complicated repositioning.
Meanwhile, rates have disconnected from reality. Spot rates hit around $2.15 per mile in late 2025, which looks close to break-even until you factor in deadhead. True costs ran closer to $2.60. Many carriers hauled freight at a loss without realizing it.
Then there’s compliance. The 2025 English proficiency crackdown pulled over 7,000 drivers off the road in weeks, and dispatchers still don’t know which rules apply at which port of entry. The ground keeps shifting.
What This Reveals About Operations
The 24/7 news cycle makes things seem like the sky is falling, but none of these problems are new. Carriers have always dealt with visibility gaps, legacy systems, and paper-based workflows. Geopolitical volatility just accelerated the consequences.
Carriers without unified visibility across U.S., Mexico, and Canada legs found themselves blind when disruptions hit. Fragmented systems meant safety, compliance, dispatch, and HR all had to catch up separately when rules changed. Manual documentation turned into a liability when customs enforcement tightened, and errors that used to slide started generating fines and delays.
The common thread: Problems that were manageable in stable conditions became critical failures under pressure. A carrier could paper over cracks during calm markets. The current environment splits those cracks wide open.
Cross-Border Freight as a Risk-Balancing Mechanism (Not a Cure)
Cross-border lanes offer real value as a stabilizer. Diversifying across markets smooths out bumps. When U.S. spot freight collapsed, carriers with Mexico and Canada exposure kept baseline volume. Experts called U.S.-Mexico freight “a stabilizing force” through 2025 and into 2026.
But hauling across borders doesn’t automatically make life easier. The complexity exposes weaknesses faster. A paperwork error that causes minor irritation on a domestic load can stop a truck at the border for days. Carriers with fragmented systems or manual processes learned this the hard way when 2025’s enforcement crackdowns turned routine mistakes into costly delays.
Cross-border rewards carriers built for complexity. Those with real-time visibility, digital documentation, and rapid response capabilities turned uncertainty into an advantage. Everyone else got a stress test they didn’t sign up for.
Where EKA Solutions Fits
Volatility rewards carriers with the right infrastructure. The ones who survive uncertainty aren’t necessarily the biggest or the fastest. They’re the ones whose systems hold up when conditions change overnight.
We built our entire tech ecosystem and Omni-TMS™ at EKA Solutions for exactly that reality. So, in 2026 beginning with US-Canada cross-border Freight, EKA has begun to build a tech suite that will include the following capabilities:
- End-to-End Visibility Across Borders: Our unified cloud-based platform tracks loads whether they’re moving through Dallas or crossing into Manitoba. Dispatchers will be able to see truck locations, status, delays, and documents across all regions from a single view. When a truck gets held at customs or a route shuts down, you will know immediately and can adjust before it becomes a crisis.
- Standardized, Automated Workflows: Different countries mean different documentation requirements. We will integrate U.S. ELD logs, Mexican pedimentos, and Canadian customs declarations into automated, consistent workflows. You will be able to set compliance guardrails so loads don’t dispatch until all required documents are uploaded. EKA will be able to handle all currency related tasks including invoicing, payments and accounting.
- Rapid Response Capabilities: Fast-changing conditions demand fast decisions. We aggregate market data alongside your operations data so you can analyze profitability by lane and identify alternatives when tariffs or enforcement actions change the math.
- Resilience Over Optimization: Traditional TMS platforms sold cost savings in stable conditions. We focus on flexibility and durability that holds up for the long haul.
- Structural Advantage When It Counts: You can integrate a new customs broker in days, activate cargo insurance for high-risk lanes with a few clicks, and automatically flag route alternatives when border closures hit.
The Rules Changed: Your Strategy Should Too
The freight market didn’t break. The world around it got unpredictable, and that unpredictability isn’t going away. Tariffs, border enforcement, trade policy fights, and energy crises in countries you’ll never haul to.
All of it lands on your P&L eventually.
Mexico and Canada aren’t trending. They’re where carriers go to find consistency when domestic freight can’t offer it. The growth numbers are real, but the real value is simpler: these lanes are tied to production schedules and long-term contracts that don’t evaporate when spot rates crater.
Carriers who recognized this early stopped waiting for the market to stabilize and started building operations that don’t need it to. That’s the difference now. Not who has the most trucks or the best rates, but who can absorb the next surprise without falling apart.
That’s what we help with. If your operation needs to get there, reach out.