Nearly four out of five children's toys purchased across the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region contain at least one toxic element, according to a University of Texas at El Paso study that screened 333 toys bought from popular retail stores over an 11-month period. About 1 in 8 toys contained metal concentrations above both U.S. and Mexican safety limits, and children's jewelry emerged as the highest-risk category, with some decorative metal components containing as much as 67 percent lead.
A First-of-Its-Kind Binational Screening
The study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, is described as the first binational screening of hazardous metals in toys sold on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to KTSM 9 News. Researchers acquired 109 toys in El Paso and 224 toys in Ciudad Juárez, screening them for lead, cadmium, arsenic, chromium, nickel, zinc, and titanium using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a technique that measures the total amount of metal in a toy. Overall, UTEP said 78 percent of toys contained at least one element of concern, and about 1 in 8 contained three or more.
The binational community surrounding the two cities, known as the Paso del Norte region, includes roughly 565,000 children, according to the same report. Toys purchased in Ciudad Juárez were roughly three times more likely to exceed safety thresholds than toys purchased in El Paso, and arsenic and cadmium detections were concentrated among items purchased in Ciudad Juárez.
Jewelry Stands Out as Highest-Risk Category
Children's jewelry made up about 41 percent of the toy collection researchers examined, and it stood out as the most contaminated category. One tested item contained 100 percent nickel, while four samples contained more than 60 percent nickel. Nickel appeared in more than a third of all toy samples overall, per the study.
Cadmium was detected in 15 toys and arsenic in 18, while lead itself appeared in roughly 3 percent of toys tested. Zinc was the most commonly detected element across the full sample set, showing up in 47.7 percent of toys, followed by nickel in 34.2 percent, titanium in 28.5 percent, chromium in 6.6 percent, arsenic in 5.4 percent, cadmium in 4.5 percent, and lead in 2.7 percent, according to the peer-reviewed Environmental Pollution abstract.
Why Kids Face Higher Risk Than Adults
Jorge Gardea-Torresdey, a UTEP professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the study's senior author, framed the health stakes plainly. “Children are not small adults. Their bodies take in heavy metals more readily than ours do,” he said. Arsenic and cadmium are classified as human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, underscoring why researchers flagged those elements even at lower detection rates than zinc or nickel.
The study's authors were careful to frame their results as a screening-level indicator of potential risk rather than confirmed regulatory violations. Jesus Antonio Rodríguez-Loya, a doctoral student in UTEP's environmental science and engineering Ph.D. program, conceived the study alongside Gardea-Torresdey and performed the experiments. Juan Pedro Flores Margez, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, conducted the study's statistical analysis, while Maricarmen Lerma and Abraham Dagda-Torres, both UTEP co-authors and Ph.D. students, contributed to the research. Marc Knecht, dean of the UTEP College of Science, said researchers “applied a sophisticated analytical technique to a question affecting parents in the Paso del Norte region.”
How U.S. and Mexican Safety Limits Compare
Toy safety regulations on both sides of the border are based on the amount of metal that can migrate through contact with saliva or sweat, not just the total metal present in a product. Under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act and federal standard ASTM F963-23, the U.S. caps lead content in accessible children's product components at 100 parts per million and sets soluble limits of 75 parts per million for cadmium and 25 parts per million for arsenic, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In Mexico, Official Standard NOM-252-SSA1-2011 sets its own bioavailability limits, including soluble limits of 25 mg/kg for arsenic and 75 mg/kg for cadmium, per Bureau Veritas México.
Because UTEP's screening relied on surface-level X-ray fluorescence rather than migration testing, the total metal levels detected don't automatically confirm a regulatory violation under either country's soluble-limit standards. The research team's planned follow-up work includes leaching tests that simulate real-world use, along with expanded sampling in other border communities, to determine whether the metals detected on toy surfaces would actually migrate into a child's body through normal handling or mouthing.
A Border Enforcement Landscape in Flux
The findings land as federal regulators tighten oversight of toy imports nationally. Effective July 8, 2026, the Consumer Product Safety Commission instituted mandatory eFiling, requiring toy importers to electronically submit Children's Product Certificates and lab test data directly to U.S. Customs at entry rather than upon request afterward, converting the agency into something closer to a real-time border surveillance system. That shift follows years of joint CPSC and Customs and Border Protection operations that, in one four-year monitoring period, intercepted more than 8 million units of non-compliant or hazardous toys at U.S. ports of entry.
Concerns about toxic contamination in imported goods aren't limited to toys. Hoodline previously reported on counterfeit jewelry seizures in which federal lab testing found cadmium and lead concentrations reaching 200,000 parts per million, more than 2,000 times above federal safety thresholds. Hoodline also covered squishy toys testing positive for formaldehyde in a separate case involving ASTM F963-23 chemical hazard standards, and reported in February on a recall of handwriting kits over lead in pens under federal limits.
El Paso's Long History With Lead Exposure
UTEP's Lead Research Team has studied child lead exposure in El Paso since 2006, identifying legacy industrial soil contamination, pre-1978 housing paint, and border consumer goods like pottery and candies as recurring toxic hazard sources in the region. A 2018 UTEP study had already examined blood lead, cadmium, and mercury concentrations in 222 urban and rural El Paso children ages 5 to 12, finding geographic disparities in how heavy metals were absorbed across the region.
Public health thresholds for lead exposure have also shifted in recent years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered its childhood blood lead reference value from 5.0 to 3.5 micrograms per deciliter in October 2021, stating that no safe blood lead level exists for young children. The Texas Department of State Health Services adopted that lower reference value on January 1, 2023, allowing state health programs to begin case management for children who previously fell below action levels.
The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Dudley family's endowment for Gardea-Torresdey's professorship, and Mexico's Secretaría de Ciencia, Humanidades, Tecnología e Innovación. Researchers say the open questions now are whether the planned leaching tests confirm soluble migration beyond what surface screening detected, and how retail oversight of unbranded or informal-market toys is handled on both sides of the border going forward.
