IN Brief:
- Redwood has added licensed customs brokerage and FTZ operations to its cross-border offer.
- The acquisition brings a 250,000 sq ft warehouse footprint in Laredo.
- Integrated brokerage, warehousing, and visibility are becoming default shipper expectations.
Redwood Logistics has acquired EELCO, a Laredo, Texas-based customs brokerage and warehousing provider, adding licensed customs brokerage capability and Foreign-Trade Zone (FTZ) warehousing to its cross-border platform at the U.S. – Mexico border. The company said the move is designed to extend its Redwood Mexico operation, which already manages a large volume of northbound and southbound freight across a broad carrier network.
“The way companies are building and managing their supply chains is fundamentally changing,” said Mark Yeager, CEO, Redwood. “Nearshoring is reshaping global trade flows, tariff complexity is accelerating and shippers are demanding partners who can manage the full picture — not just move freight, but navigate compliance, integrate data and orchestrate everything in between. Acquiring EELCO is about meeting that moment. It makes Redwood’s platform more complete, more capable and better positioned to serve customers who need a true end-to-end partner.”
Redwood said its cross-border solution has been orchestrating U.S. – Mexico freight for more than a decade and today manages over 40,000 annual cross-border shipments across a network of more than 300 carrier partners. EELCO adds a 250,000 sq ft warehouse in Laredo, a sister operation in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and dedicated operations at other locations supporting customer activity.
The deal lands in a region where scale and cadence are hard to ignore. Port of Laredo’s trade value in 2025 was cited at roughly $354bn, ranking it as the top U.S. border crossing by trade value, with significant daily commercial truck movements across its bridges. That throughput concentrates both the upside and the friction — dwell time, documentation accuracy, inspection risk, and the steady reality that customs compliance is now a frontline operating discipline rather than a back-office function.
Redwood is positioning the acquisition around that compliance load. The company pointed to Section 232 tariffs, anti-dumping duties, UFLPA enforcement, and heightened HTS classification scrutiny as factors that can make fragmented brokerage arrangements costly, particularly when freight execution, broker communications, and documentation sit in different systems. Folding a licensed brokerage and FTZ warehousing capability into the same operating model is intended to reduce handoffs, align data, and keep exception management close to the freight.
“Mexico is no longer just an emerging trade story,” said Jordan Dewart, President, Redwood Mexico. “The $100 billion invested in Mexican manufacturing over the past five years has created an enormous demand for reliable northbound and southbound cross-border logistics. The acquisition of EELCO extends Redwood Mexico’s ability as a licensed customs brokerage to meet that demand head-on — serving our existing customers with greater speed and solving more complex problems for the industry at large.”
FTZ capability adds another lever, particularly for importers balancing duty exposure, inventory buffering, and cross-dock cycles near the border. For high-velocity lanes, the operational value is often less about the zone itself and more about how tightly the warehouse, broker filings, and shipment visibility are stitched together.
“Thirty years of port relationships, operational trust and licensed expertise do not disappear in an acquisition. It gets amplified,” said Eduardo Lozano, CEO of EELCO. “Inside Redwood’s network, our customers get the specialized knowledge they have always relied on us for, now backed by technology and infrastructure that simplifies every step of the cross-border journey.”
