Is El Paso full of baloney? CBP says seizures of pork products are on the rise
When President Joe Biden toured the Bridge of the Americas on a bright January day, U.S. customs officers demonstrated how they search for contraband at the international port of entry.
A K-9 sniffed around a suitcase pulled from the trunk of a car as Biden watched behind the shade of his Ray-Bans. An officer took a knee and presented a product beloved by many norteños, feared by U.S. pork producers and deemed illegal by the USDA: a thick, red, 6-pound roll of Mexican bologna.
The fake seizure was classic El Paso.
Although other ports of entry in Texas and California beat El Paso in total pork products seized annually, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's El Paso field office is the only one that consistently reports large seizures of the lunch meat known in Spanish as salchichón.
"Here at the port of El Paso we're kind of famous for bologna seizures so we couldn't have missed that opportunity to show the president that was one of our top-seizing items," said CBP Chief Agriculture Specialist Chad Gerber, who participated in Biden's tour of the Bridge of the Americas.
Every few months, CBP in El Paso drops a headline about the latest major bologna seizures:
- In October, a U.S. citizen driving a red pick-up tried to smuggle 484 pounds of Mexican bologna over the Downtown Paso del Norte international bridge, at 1:30 a.m. The driver stashed the deli meat in the toolbox of his truck and under a blanket in the truck bed but was caught.
- In August, a U.S. citizen tried unsuccessfully to traffic 4,600 Tramadol pills and 90 pounds of Chimex-brand bologna at the Santa Teresa port of entry. She hid the rolls under the seats of her car.
- Last year in January, in separate events, U.S. citizens — a man from Albuquerque and a woman from Pueblo, Colorado — tried to smuggle Mexican bologna at El Paso-area ports. The man had 55 pounds of undeclared bologna and told CBP Agriculture Specialists "that he resells the bologna in the U.S. for almost double the price he pays for them in Mexico." The woman got caught with 188 pounds of bologna tucked under a back seat, inside duvet cover liners and mixed with her luggage.
Seizures of pork products, including bologna, at El Paso-area ports of entry, rose 21% in 2022 to 1,853 items from 1,528 items confiscated in 2021, according to CBP. The El Paso field office statistics include the Tornillo port in West Texas, four urban bridges and New Mexico's three ports of entry.
The Laredo, Tucson and San Diego field offices of CBP also registered large increases in pork product seizures in 2022, year over year. Pork product seizures rose 46% in Laredo to more than 6,000 items last year; seizures rose 30% in Tucson and 19% in San Diego to more than 5,700 items each.
The statistics don't break out bologna specifically. Seized pork products are incinerated at the port of entry, and those who don't declare agricultural products can face up to $1,000 in fines, according to the USDA.
"While El Paso has the lowest overall totals of the four border field offices, for some reason we seem to get almost all of the large bologna seizures," said CBP El Paso spokesman Roger Maier. "I can’t recall our other locations routinely publicizing this commodity."
The brand most often smuggled through El Paso is Chimex, a company whose online origin story vaguely claims it was "born in the north of the Mexican Republic." The bologna is a staple of Chihuahua groceries and tienditas, though, and is now owned by packaged foods conglomerate Sigma-Alimentos.
Based in San Pedro Garza Garcia, a wealthy suburb of Monterrey in Nuevo Leon, Sigma-Alimentos produces dozens of food brands for distribution in Mexico and 17 other countries.
In the U.S., the company's salchichón is sold under a hyphenated brand, FUD-Chimex, and the ingredient list of the U.S. product differs from the original Chimex. Sigma acquired both the Chimex and FUD brands in 1985.
Pork products, including bologna, can be commercially imported from Mexico — but it's unlawful for individuals to bring them across the border. That's because the U.S. Department of Agriculture tightly regulates the import of foodstuffs to prevent the spread of disease and to protect U.S. national production.
Bologna trafficking is no joke to 66,000 U.S. pork producers.
More than 140 million hogs worth $28 billion are at stake, according to the National Pork Producers Council.
The industry association worries about the importation of unchecked pork products, which can carry diseases that threaten the nation's swine. It lobbies for increased funding for CBP to conduct searches.
"The big concern that we have is transmission of a foreign animal disease," said Maria Zieba, NPPC vice president of international affairs. "African swine fever is a disease that has a really high mortality rate in swine."
Hogs can become infected, even through lunchmeat: For example, if feral pigs rifle through human trash, they can contract the disease and spread it to hog farms, Zieba said.
CBP has signs in English and Spanish in the pedestrian lane at the Bridge of the Americas warning about African swine fever, although the U.S. Department of Agriculture lists Mexico as being free from that disease.
It's not just Mexico that is targeted; travelers also can't bring back prosciutto from Italy or jamon serrano from Spain.
"The U.S. government makes a lot of really serious efforts to make sure that what we’re importing to the United States isn’t dangerous for the U.S. public," Zieba said. "With Mexico specifically, a lot of that has been codified under NAFTA, which is now the USMCA."
Still, the local lore of bologna seizures has become something of an inside joke.
When CBP explained a few years ago that locals could bring back bologna in a sandwich — what "could fit between two slices of bread" — some creative individuals began putting 4-inch thick "slices" between white bread and calling it a sandwich, Gerber said. (The bologna was confiscated.)
So what did the president think about the bologna presentation?
The president "asked the significance of it and he seemed real curious," Gerber said. "All the White House staffers were very curious and interested in the ag seizures."
"It's just kind of a synonymous thing with El Paso, our bologna seizures," he said. "I always say, we're kind of bologna-famous here in El Paso."