What the American public needs to know and how CBP is tackling the problem
Read the full article on the US Customs and Border Protection website.
Contrary to popular belief, good things do not always come in small packages. In fiscal year 2023, 85% of the shipments U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized for health and safety violations were small packages. The packages contained dangerous materials that could cause serious harm to American consumers and the U.S. economy. Propelled by online shopping, duty-free de minimis shipments—packages with an aggregate value of $800 or less—are skyrocketing and putting consumers at risk.
Currently, de minimis shipments account for 92% of all cargo entering the U.S. and that figure is growing in epic proportions. CBP processes approximately 4 million de minimis shipments a day, up from 2.8 million last year. Bad actors are exploiting this explosion in volume to traffic counterfeits, dangerous narcotics, and other illicit goods including precursor chemicals and materials such as pill presses and die molds used to manufacture fentanyl and other synthetic drugs that are killing Americans.
The majority of the more than 1 billion de minimis shipments CBP processed last year were in the air environment. Roughly 800 million, or 88%, of these shipments arrived through international mail; express courier services such as UPS, DHL, and FedEx; or were transported as cargo on commercial airline flights. At John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York where 25% of all de minimis shipments are processed, the volume is staggering. “On any given day, we could receive and process 750,000 to a million de minimis shipments,” said Andrew Renna, Assistant Port Director for Cargo Operations at JFK Airport. Along with four express courier facilities, the airport houses the country’s largest by volume international mail facility where 60% of international mail arrives in the U.S. “We have limited resources,” said Renna. “We only have X number of staff. There is no physical way if I doubled or even tripled my staffing that I could look at a significant percentage of that. So due to the volume, it’s a very exploitable mode of entry into the U.S.”
“De minimis,” a Latin expression that means trivial or so minor that something can be disregarded, is anything but in the trade realm. Bad actors employ a number of techniques to smuggle items or evade paying duties. Undervaluation of goods, misclassification of merchandise, inaccurate or vague cargo descriptions, and describing products as something innocuous when, in fact, they’re harmful are just a few of the tactics.
“We’ve encountered shipments that have been declared as footwear and jackets, but found smuggled beef, pork, and poultry animal products instead,” said Renna. “The products are prohibited in the United States because of the risk of foreign animal disease. Should an animal disease outbreak occur in the United States, it could have significant impact on the U.S. economy and the world economy. Any disruption to the food supply chain causes economic harm,” said Renna. “Just this year so far at JFK, we have seized over 33,000 pounds of prohibited animal products in the de minimis environment. Many of the countries that we’ve seized this from are affected by African swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, and avian influenza or bird flu. The beef, pork, and poultry industries are collectively worth over $200 billion annually in the U.S. and they support millions of jobs. So in just this one area, where de minimis is being exploited, it’s harmful to our domestic agriculture supply.”