Commerce Pulls Willacy County Into McAllen FTZ 12

FTZ News: Commerce put Willacy County inside Foreign-Trade Zone 12. The McAllen zone used to end at Hidalgo County. It does not, as of the notice going into Thursday’s Federal Register.

This is drawn from a Sept. 16 Targeted News write-up of the Foreign-Trade Zones Board action, from application B-39-2025 published Aug. 13, 2025, and from the 1934 Act filings that sit behind both. Mark E. Garcia, who runs the zone, talked earlier this year to the Rio Grande Guardian about Port Mansfield and a second Soluna data hall. Those remarks are his. The Board paper does not name either project.

Zone 12 opened Oct. 23, 1970, Board Order 84. Twelfth zone in the country. First inland grant that was not tied to a harbor or an airfield. The alternative site framework arrived Aug. 11, 2017. Inside that frame the grantee can pin usage-driven sites and subzones anywhere in the published service area, still under the 2,000-acre activation lid. Hidalgo was the area. Willacy is now on the same map. The application called the county adjacent to the Hidalgo port of entry. That adjacency is what lets an inland zone reach it.

A building in Raymondville is not in the zone at sunrise. Someone still files with McAllen Foreign Trade Zone, Inc., and Customs still has to activate the acres. Deferral, inverted tariff, weekly entry — none of that starts on the strength of a county line.

Garcia has said the county judge wanted in and that the little Gulf harbor could use the program. Fair enough for a pitch. The Register item is a boundary order. Read it as a factory and you have written past the page.

He told a McAllen audience in March the Washington file had stalled through furloughs and he was aiming at May. The docket had been open since August 2025. This week’s notice ends that wait. The 2,000-acre cap did not move. The port of entry did not move. Willacy can now be served. Each site still walks in on its own paper.


Photo by Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza