The banks of the Rio Grande bristle with concertina wire. At intervals, Texas National Guardsmen and other troops sent by President Trump stand guard over the border.
And several times a week, the sheriff of Maverick County, Texas, drives back and forth over an international bridge — to do his dry cleaning.
“I get my hair cut in Mexico too,” the sheriff, Tom Schmerber, said during a recent trip as he hauled a garbage bag filled with his dirty uniforms.
Those chores are the kinds of routine, international economic transactions that people on the border have long taken for granted — and that people far from the border, especially those making policy in Washington, D.C., rarely consider.
And they are threatened by tightening controls that are already hampering crossings for many would-be consumers, investors and business interests in Mexico and the United States. Formerly bustling downtowns near border crossings have been transformed by successive clampdowns. Fewer shoppers mean many vacant storefronts.
And now, President Trump has injected still more uncertainty into border communities. Rounds of deportations, military deployments and especially the looming worry of punishing tariffs on Mexican goods threaten to upend the economic life of already fragile border cities.
“What is not good is this uncertainty,” said Jerry Pacheco, president of the Border Industrial Association, a trade group based in Santa Teresa, N.M., near El Paso. “The border is a harbinger of what is going to happen to the rest of the economy.”
For generations, it was commonplace for residents along the border to essentially live as if their bisected cities were one continuous community. But waves of mass migration and subsequent crackdowns have made such trips less a part of daily life.
In recent months, starting with limits imposed by the Biden administration and continuing under Mr. Trump, casual crossings have become impractical if not impossible, particularly for shoppers from Mexico with temporary visas who now often wait in long lines to enter the United States.
“They stopped coming,” Gracie Benavides, 58, said as she hung blouses at a clothing store in downtown Eagle Pass that had been popular with Mexican shoppers. “This used to be a great store.”
She was apprehensive about what will come next. “We’re just waiting on what’s going to happen,” she said.
The threat of 25 percent across-the-board tariffs has not helped. When the tariffs were announced on Feb. 1, some companies rushed to bring products from Mexico into the United States.
“Everybody wants to import everything — we’re trying to keep up,” said Miriam Kotkowski, the head of transportation services for Tecma, which helps companies manufacture products just over the border in Mexico.
Then just as quickly as he announced these tariffs, Mr. Trump withdrew them.
Still, the uncertainty remains. Mr. Trump postponed the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for just a month, and it’s anybody’s guess what concessions he will demand from those countries next.
On the one hand, Tecma’s president, Alan Russell, remained optimistic because he felt the proposed tariffs would be so blunt and destructive they could never happen. “It’s completely impractical,” he said, sitting in his El Paso offices.
At the same time, Mr. Russell added, “It’s difficult to make plans.”
International trade helps support border cities, through things like fees on crossings and on truck inspections, or by creating jobs in trucking and at warehouses, or by drawing customers from both sides of the international divide. In Roma, Texas, a small city in the Rio Grande Valley, leaders had hoped to attract jobs by creating an industrial park near the border.
Construction has begun for the first business, but the future of the industrial park is now less certain, said the city manager, Alejandro Barrera.
“I don’t know if there’s going to be less trucks crossing over because of the tariffs,” he said. “We have good relationships with our counterparts in Mexico,” he added. “I think at the end of the day things will work out.”
In Laredo, the nation’s busiest land port, the highways remain jammed with trucks heading to and from Mexico. In Downtown Laredo, however, storefronts are shuttered, and buildings are abandoned.
While local business owners expressed relief that Mr. Trump had postponed his proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada, many were still bracing for a 10 percent tariff on products from China.
“It’s hard not to feel deflated,” said Espiridion Razo Padilla, who owns a shoe store. “We are here now. But for how long? We don’t know.”
Even before the possibility of tariffs, he was feeling the pinch, he said. About half of the store’s customers come from Mexico. When business was good, daily sales might reach $700. On a recent day, he didn’t ring the cash register before 1 p.m. and made just about $100.
“People are already feeling nervous,” Mr. Padilla said. “They know that more tariffs or taxes, which is what they really are, is going to mean higher prices.”
But Mr. Padilla, 60, felt powerless.
“We barely have enough to eat,” he said. “What are we going to eat if things get worse? Eat seeds?”
He declined to say who he voted for in the last presidential election.
Not every business owner was so worried.
“I want the wall, and I want Trump to go crazy with the tariffs,” said Luvi Samtani, 58, who runs Asian Paradise Inc., a watch and jewelry store steps away from an international bridge.
He hoped that steep tariffs would reduce the constant rumble of trucks from Mexico that clog the city’s streets. As for his business, Mr. Samtani said he got his inventory from Switzerland and Japan, so he was not concerned.
Many Texans on the border still cross for entertainment, restaurants or more affordable medical care. Others have grown wary of making the trip because of concerns about the potential danger, the occasional reports of violence and the risk of long wait times coming back into the United States.
“It’s been 20 years since I’ve been over to Mexico,” said Ricardo Chavarria, a deputy constable who works in Maverick County. “This is the closest I’ve been,” he said, standing near the banks of the Rio Grande on a recent afternoon.
By contrast, Sheriff Schmerber said he went to the Mexican city of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, three or four times a week. He travels in his own Chevy pickup and leaves his gun behind because he can’t bring it into Mexico.
On a recent trip, he navigated the truck over one of the two international bridges, pointing out sites in Piedras Negras: the city hall, a central park, a favorite cigar-and-whiskey bar that he likes for its Cuban cigars.
“I don’t feel in danger,” he said. “I bring my wife sometimes.”
In less than 15 minutes, he arrived at a small shopping center with an outpost of Ito’s, a chain of Mexican dry cleaners that he learned about from a friend who lives nearby.
The sheriff, who speaks fluent Spanish, greeted Ricardo Rangel, the manager of the shop, who proceeded to count out the clothes, including his sheriff uniforms.
“Seven shirts. Four pants,” he said in Spanish. “Tomorrow afternoon is good?”
“Sí,” the sheriff replied.
The sheriff, an elected Democrat, started taking his clothes over the border after growing frustrated with how long it took the dry cleaner in Eagle Pass to return his clothes. “They take seven days to do my uniform,” he said.
After dropping off his laundry, Mr. Schmerber went for lunch. He said he tried not to worry too much about politics now, even if the next few years would be spent under a federal government intent on clamping down on border crossings.
“Life continues,” he said.
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