Washington accuses Mexico of acting as a relay for the transhipment of Chinese goods

Published in mid-August 2026 by the White House's trade staff, a report titled The Great Transhipment Fraud identifies around forty economies acting as relays for Chinese goods that change route, documentation or packaging, or undergo minor processing, in order to enter the United States under a different declared origin. Mexico appears in the most closely watched group, alongside Canada, the European Union, India and Japan, economies with strong export capacity and preferential access to the US market.

The report puts the value of goods transhipped from China via Mexico, India and Vietnam in 2025 at around 67 billion dollars, representing an estimated 28 billion dollars in uncollected US customs duties. It specifically cites the Guanajuato-Querétaro industrial corridor as a potential transit point for electric motors and transformers, sensitive components for US industry based in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toledo and Phoenix.

The issue lies in the tariff gap: a non-preferential Chinese product bears an average duty of close to 50% on entry into the United States, against a rate close to zero if it is declared as originating in Mexico under the North American trade agreement. The report proposes an artificial-intelligence-assisted verification tool to cross-check declared routes, stated origin and the actual production capacity of Mexican factories. It comes against the backdrop of the review of the North American trade agreement planned for 2026, which calls into question the credibility of Mexican rules of origin.

For an importer who has Chinese components assembled or finished in Mexico before re-exporting them to the United States, the risk is no longer merely theoretical: simple repackaging or minor processing is no longer enough to guarantee North American preferential treatment, and exposes the goods to after-the-fact audits, a refusal of origin and retroactive duties.