Port of Brownsville: International Gateway
The Port of Brownsville anchors the nation's western Gulf Coast shipping, offering world-class port facilities and services with an emphasis on moving materials and goods between Mexico and the United States.
The Port's home city of Brownsville boasts a semi-tropical climate featuring palm trees, bougainvilleas, and exotic birds that attract avid birders from around the world. With Mexico to the south and Gulf Coast beaches to the east, Brownsville thrives in a dynamic environment steeped in the rich heritage of hundreds of years of tradition on both sides of the border.
Ships arriving and departing from the Port make their way along a 17-mile deepwater channel that opens to the Gulf of Mexico at the Brazos Santiago Pass. Available facilities include multiple docks for handling cargo, petroleum products, and liquid cargo, as well as ample space for both covered and open storage.
The Port likewise offers a variety of transport for inbound and outbound cargo, including domestic and Mexican rail transport, inland vessels, pipeline networks, barge traffic, air transport, and trucking service.
Notably, the Port of Brownsville also participates in Foreign Trade Zone #62, the largest such zone in Texas and one of the largest in the country. As explained at the Port of Brownsville's website, the purpose of an FTZ is to attract and promote domestic participation in international trade and commerce. Goods situated in an FTZ are considered to be outside the US Customs territory, with several significant results. Among other things, the merchandise is subject to duty only when it leaves the FTZ for consumption in the US market.
As new projects, the Port of Brownsville is moving toward enhanced support for short sea shipping, in which brown water and ocean barges move cargo on routes from the Port to relatively close destinations such as Houston, Florida, and Progreso, Mexico. The facility also is working on improvements that include deepening and widening the port-access ship channel to accommodate even larger ocean-going vessels.
Earlier this year, the Port of Brownsville also received word that its proposed Marine Highway Project was selected as one of eight such projects approved under the Marine Highway Program. The Cross Gulf Container Expansion Project, a 926-mile sea route across the Gulf of Mexico dubbed "M-10," will build on existing container-on-barge service between Brownsville and Port Manatee, Florida.
With established services in place and plans for continued expansion, the Port of Brownsville looks forward to meeting global maritime needs while attracting ever more commerce to the southern Texas Gulf Coast gateway.
If you have any questions regarding a maritime incident or have suffered a maritime injury, contact a maritime attorney online at Arnold & Itkin LLP for a free consultation or call our maritime law office toll free at 866-222-2606.
