# Returning to the US with (say) a 10' truck of household goods



## MangoTango (Feb 8, 2020)

So many are familiar with the process of arriving at the US/Mexican border southbound with a menaje de casa hopeful to bring household goods into Mexico. 

BUT what about going in the other direction ?

I have a condo hunting trip booked for the Acapulco area in April and I'm about to book an apartment hunting trip for South Florida in June (although I have a place already in mind as a possibility). 

My gardener had a former life as a small truck driver throughout Mexico. He tells me he could get my important stuff up to the border no problem (and cheap). Just for giggles let's say I was sitting on the US side of the border in Laredo waiting with my empty 10' U-Haul truck. What is involved in getting to the point where the two vehicles are backed up to each other (on the US side) and I am transferring the contents between the two - for my drive to Florida ?


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## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

The first problem you're going to have is your gardener won't have a passport and can't cross the border. The second problem is your U-haul rental agreement won't allow you to drive it into Mexico. 

What you might be able to do, if you had your own vehicle with some cargo capacity (an SUV or van without seats) is to have your gardener truck your stuff to the border and you rent a storage unit for a month on the Mexican side - and another unit on the US side. Then you spend a week's worth of days doing day-trips across the border with an SUV load of stuff to transfer from one storage to another. Then once everything is in storage on the US side you're good to rent a U-haul, load and go.

That scenerio is quite the PITA because of having to load and unload everything 3 times, not counting any additional unloading/reloading required at the border. But there is always day-labor help available. 

Also I couldn't find any pointers to storage places on the Mexican side of the border (or I might have tried it in reverse). If there is any duty to be paid at all, it will reduce it because you get a duty-free allowance every trip.


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## MangoTango (Feb 8, 2020)

Good morning eastwind and thank you for the challenge. 

To be honest - at this very moment I am leaning towards Acapulco. But lets talk Laredo for a moment. I am only telling pieces of the situation. My 'gardener' is a lot more than that and he has a patron who is one of the bodega kings (well princes anyway) in central Mexico. Interesting guy. Maybe 78 on his 3rd or 4th wife. Speaks excellent English and for some reason I don't understand, every year he heads off to Texas to something like a VA hospital for a battery of tests (he is very Mexican). 

I wouldn't expect my gardener to be behind the wheel of the northbound truck. Ok - so I am in a positive mood this morning. Virtually anyone could be driving the truck north - with all sorts of credentials. I need to talk to Mr Bodega at some point soon anyway - I'll toss this idea out to him and get his feedback. In theory (although it would not be near the top of my list) - couldn't I be sitting in the cab of the small truck and drive it across the border ? with a Mexican friend who has a passport or visa or whatever that let's him enter the US ? Don't Mexicans cross the US/Mexican border every day for work and such ? What am I missing ?


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## eastwind (Jun 18, 2016)

Not missing anything. People do cross the border every day for school, but I think they have passports. An employee of a company, e.g. a driver, who has to cross the border for work reasons will probably have their passport paid for by the company. But a working-class Mexican living a long way from the border is probably not going to have spent the money to get a passport. 

I don't think a Mexican (not-dual) citizen, even with a passport, can legally cross the border every day to work without various documentation, starting with a visa. There are a lot of dual-citizens living in the border towns that have US passports and live on the Mexican side but go to school, for example, on the US side.

Mr. Bodega will likely know better than me. To bring a foreign vehicle into the US you are supposed to have US insurance on it and the driver. There are companies that specialize in cross-border moves, you could contact one of them.


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## kphoger (Apr 22, 2020)

The real sticking point doesn't have to do with passports or storage units. It's that commercial vehicles aren't allowed to cross the border, unless they are either (a) on a short list of vetted long-haul carriers or (b) dedicated drayage trucks shuttling trailers from drayage yard to drayage yard. A number of the carriers on that short list were grandfathered in decades ago, and some others may have joined the list during the ill-fated cross-border trucking pilot program of 20 years ago or so, but—as far as I know—no new ones get added. So it doesn't really matter how your goods get to Nuevo Laredo, nor how your goods get out of Laredo: the rub is how you get them between the two, and the answer to that is no surprise: either a customs broker, or your own vehicle making multiple trips.


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