US, Mexico To Push Relaxed Border Controls For ‘Trusted Traveler’ Program At ‘Three Amigos’ Summit

The heads of the United States, Mexico and Canada met in the Mexican state of Toluca on Wednesday for the so-called “Three Amigos” summit of North American leaders, where officials said they would discuss ways to boost trade and commerce. On the agenda for the United States and Mexico is an expansion of its Trusted Traveler programs, which allow pre-approved travelers access to quicker crossings at ports of entry, where normal travelers often have to wait three or four hours to get across.

Officials told the Guardian that the two countries and Canada want to establish an agreement to expedite the movement of executives and other regular international travelers through a continent-wide pre-approval system. One senior official in the Mexican foreign affairs ministry said leaders would “start by mutually recognizing” already-existing programs like Nexus, Global Entry, Sentry, and the Mexico-US program Viajero Confiable, and moving on to put “all the information of those three programs together in order to get a North American trusted traveller program.”

President Barack Obama was expected to make his trip to Toluca short – he would not be spending the night there – for a summit where the failure of immigration reform in the United States and insecurity in Mexico shadowed talks. Obama and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto both hope to quickly pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement between 12 American and Pacific nations which, in the case of Mexico and the US, would effectively build upon the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But as the Los Angeles Times notes, a host of Democratic groups including labor, environmental, and consumer groups – the latter two of which criticize NAFTA’s meager protections for the environment and consumers – oppose the TPP, saying NAFTA ought to be renegotiated instead.