Defense contractor plans aerospace manufacturing expansion in Brownsville

A defense industry contractor with deep roots across the U.S.-Mexico border is planning a new manufacturing operation in Brownsville.

New Jersey-based Kearfott Corporation, a subsidiary of Astronautics Corporation of America, expects to lease and build-out a 24,000-square-foot manufacturing facility along Highway 48 near North Central Avenue.

Kearfott has manufactured in Matamoros, a Mexican border city in northern Tamaulipas, for decades, employing several hundred workers as part of its motion systems division. 

For the past 15 years, Kearfott has been leasing about 3,400 square feet at the logistics forwarding facility it plans to remodel. The upgrades from a logistics hub to a warehouse and manufacturing facility is expected to be a multi-million dollar investment over the next few months. 

While the company plans to retrofit the whole 24,000-square-foot building, the initial operation is likely going to start smaller. The initial manufacturing process will require about 5,000 square feet. 

“We’re excited about the opportunity to establish this type of aerospace manufacturing, which is precision-wound components and wire harnesses here in Brownsville,” Horacio Rodriguez, general manager of the Kearfott Corporation’s Matamoros facility and leader of the Brownsville operation, said. 

Rodriguez has been in the role for nearly three decades and oversees more than 270 workers at the Matamoros plant. 

The Brownsville logistics operation has six employees and the manufacturing arm is expected to require about two dozen workers to start. The company expects to train the future assemblers and operators and will need quality assurance employees and an engineer. The potential pay scale was not immediately available. 

The company supplies both the defense industry, mostly the U.S. Department of Defense, and some commercial customers. The company expects to assemble actuators in Brownsville. 

“Imagine winding, taking magnetic wire and building a stator, part of a motor. It requires electronics and testing and impregnating this material to make these products sustain its operation. So it’ll require extensive testing and manufacturability to be able to produce this one component,” he said. “Once we get going and the processes get validated, then we would ramp up.” 

Tariffs imposed on goods imported into the U.S. — which has prompted a trade war for the past year — did not factor in the decision, Rodriguez said. 

Instead, the company is moving forward in Brownsville as part of its continuity plan. Its motor systems division and manufacturing site in North Carolina was temporarily shuttered for a month after the region was hit by Hurricane Helene in September 2024. 

The goal now is to ramp up the Brownsville operation to produce about one-third of the volume of its North Carolina site. 

“The idea was to have another continuity source so we could triangulate and be able to support all our customers for whatever unforeseen reason. We did have a catastrophic event in North Carolina, one of the hurricanes, and it impacted us,” Rodriguez said. “The project is still under development and several details are still being finalized.”