About this site
borderwait.live shows live wait times for US-Mexico border crossings in a format designed to be readable from the driver's seat of a car in the lineup. It exists because the existing CBP site, while authoritative, is slow and cluttered on mobile.
All wait times come directly from the official U.S. Customs and Border Protection public feed at bwt.cbp.gov. This is a government-published XML feed updated continuously by CBP officers at each port of entry.
We pull this feed once per minute from our backend — never from your browser — parse it, and cache the result at the edge. By the time you load this page, the data is served from the CDN closest to you. First paint is typically under 400ms.
The feed is fetched every 60 seconds. Your browser polls our cache every 60 seconds. Worst case you're looking at data up to two minutes old — in practice it's under 90 seconds. This is close to the limit of what CBP itself reports, since officer updates happen every few minutes at most.
The "typical pattern" charts on each port page, and the heatmap on the best-time page, are hand-compiled from multi-year CBP historical data. As this site accumulates its own archive, those charts will transition to fully data-driven aggregates.
When drivers submit a post-crossing time via the report buttons, we store it hashed and time-bucketed — no IP, no identity, no account. Reports age out after two hours. The goal is to add a southbound signal (which CBP does not publish) without building any kind of user tracking.
Add this site to your home screen (Safari: Share → Add to Home Screen; Chrome: the install icon in the address bar). Once installed, the last-known wait time is available even with no signal in the border zone, clearly flagged as "cached · offline" so you know it's not live.
This site is not affiliated with CBP, DHS, or any government agency. It is an independent project that uses a public data feed. For authoritative information, consult bwt.cbp.gov directly.