Mexico’s delinquent water deliveries, in violation of an 81-year-old treaty with the United States, have exposed years of “blind eye” policies, rapid population growth, and hydrological changes, according to an expert at the U.S. Army War College.
In response, the United States is now refusing Mexico’s request for water assistance amid a drought.
“Just last month, I halted water shipments to Tijuana until Mexico complies with the 1944 Water Treaty,” Trump wrote in an April 10 post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Evan Ellis, research professor of Latin American studies at the college’s Strategic Studies Institute, told The Epoch Times that recent tensions over Mexico’s delinquent water deliveries have come from “years of looking the other way” on the part of the United States.
President Donald Trump has requested that the United States’ southern neighbor honor its obligation to deliver 1.3 million acre-feet of water to Texas. The amount totals almost 70 percent of a five-year water commitment that’s due in October.
Under the reciprocal agreement, Mexico is expected to send the United States 1.75 million acre-feet of water over a five-year cycle. That’s an average of 350,000 acre-feet of water each year. The water deliveries primarily come from six tributaries of the Rio Grande, and are stored in the Amistad and Falcon international reservoirs along the river.
Related Story
One acre-foot of water—one acre of water at a depth of one foot—is roughly enough to fill half of an Olympic-size swimming pool. Mexico’s average annual obligation is enough water to supply 700,000 to 1 million Texas households for a year.
In exchange, the United States agreed to provide Mexico with 1.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year—differing from Mexico’s five-year cycle.
The Tijuana shipments that Trump said were halted were part of a non-treaty water request from Mexico.
The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere affairs said the United States denied such a request for the first time since the treaty was signed because of Mexico’s noncompliance with its water obligations.
“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture—particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley,” the State Department wrote in a statement on social media platform X on March 20.
According to the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which handles issues related to the 1944 treaty, Mexico has failed to meet its five-year delivery obligations three times since 1992. Each of those debts was carried over to the following cycle and ultimately paid.
Mexico also fell short in average minimum annual deliveries within the 2002–2007 and the 2015–2020 cycles. Those shortfalls were met very close to the end of the cycles—in 2020, within just three days of the deadline.
Although the deliveries were ultimately fulfilled, the unpredictable nature of water deliveries from the Rio Grande has impacted water users on both sides of the border.
The current cycle for both countries ends in October, but according to IBWC data, by March 29, just 28 percent—or less than 500,000 acre-feet of water—of Mexico’s water obligation had been delivered.
In response to a query about how much of the United States’ water commitment to Mexico has been met, IBWC public affairs chief Frank Fisher cited an agency graph showing that the United States had met about half of its 2025 commitment as of April 19.
In November 2024, the two countries agreed to a treaty amendment that would give Mexico more ways to meet its water obligation. Those options include providing water from the San Juan and Alamo rivers, which are not part of the Rio Grande tributaries specified in the treaty. The agreement also set up a working group to explore other sources of water.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said at a news conference on April 11, the day after Trump’s social media post announcing a delivery stoppage, that she expected an agreement in the coming days “that will allow the treaty to be fulfilled.” She called the treaty “fair.”
Sheinbaum told reporters that there would be “an immediate delivery of a certain number of millions of cubic meters that can be provided according to the water availability in the Rio Grande.”
—Autumn Spredemann and Joseph Lord
BOOKMARKS
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will require vaccines under trial to be tested against placebos–a substance that is meant to have no effect on patients–to check their true effectiveness. The Department of Health and Human Services had previously classified this as “unethical” in a 2018 letter.
April 30 marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and some former soldiers made a trek to the nation’s Capitol to remember their fallen comrades. The Epoch Times’ Janice Hisle spoke to some of these vets in her latest report.
Recent military purges in Communist China may indicate that its leader Xi Xinping is losing his grip on power. Several of his close allies have been expelled—or gone missing—over the past year.
The U.S. Supreme Court may pave the way for the nation’s first publicly-funded religious charter school, if it chooses to overturn a lower court’s ruling. St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in Oklahoma had previously received charter status, but this was revoked by that state’s attorney general who feared allowing the charter could eventually lead to a “public charter school teaching Sharia Law.”
The United States and Ukraine have entered into a historic rare-earth minerals agreement, amid Donald Trump’s ongoing push to end the Ukraine-Russia war. “This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
—Stacy Robinson
