Groundwater is declining in many parts of the world, with arid and semiarid regions being affected by meteorological droughts. The process of how precipitation deficits affect other components of the hydrological cycle is known as drought propagation and is critical to understanding the effects of climate variability on water availability. In this study, we analyze the propagation of meteorological drought to groundwater storage from 2002 to 2022 in a portion of the shallow, unconfined Allende-Piedras Negras aquifer in northeastern Mexico. We use a conceptual hydrological model calibrated and validated using terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSa) derived from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, actual evapotranspiration (Et) and soil moisture (SM) data from the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) v. 2.2 product. TWSa from GRACE was correlated (correlation coefficient, CC > 0.9) with eight years of groundwater head records in the aquifer, being a better indicator of groundwater storage trends at the annual scale than other global products that directly provide groundwater storage. The proposed model satisfactorily reproduced the TWSa (determination coefficient, R-2 similar to 0.56) and Et (Kling-Gupta Efficiency, KGE similar to 0.64) values with modest results in SM (CC similar to 0.61). The drought propagation analysis shows that the aquifer is climate-sensitive, where vertical groundwater recharge represents similar to 12 % of the annual precipitation, with recharge deficit duration exceeding periods of precipitation deficits. Groundwater storage is in decline (-0.4 mm/month), where the long-term decline is associated with pumping rate and the largest changes are associated to the combined effects of regional abstraction and the extraordinary droughts of 2011-2013 and 2019-2022. This study offers insights into addressing hydrological drought propagation in semiarid regions and its impact on shallow aquifers.