Changes to the de minimis statute, whether excluding China or changing the threshold, have gotten the most attention in Congress of any possible customs legislative change, but CBP says its 21st Century Customs Framework will not touch the issue.
Three senators asked Shein's CEO if the company's suppliers use cotton from Xinjiang, if they use laboratory testing to ensure there is no Xinjiang cotton in its garments, and other questions aimed at learning whether apparel made in part with forced labor is making it into the U.S. through the de minimis importation lane (see 2302090039).
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The CBP executive whose directorate covers trade remedies, intellectual property enforcement and e-commerce said that small-value shipments coming to the U.S. are not slipping through uninspected, just because there are no duties owed. Brandon Lord, executive director of the Trade Policy and Programs Directorate, said in an interview with International Trade Today at the CBP Trade Facilitation and Cargo Security Summit: "There's a misconception that we don't target or screen de minimis -- it's not true. People throw around the phrase 'loophole.' It's not a loophole. De minimis is not a loophole."
A team at Sheffield Hallam University has identified 55,000 companies involved in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), including 3,300 companies operating in textiles and 150 companies where there is "significant evidence of participation in state-sponsored transfer of legal labor," SHU professor Laura Murphy said at a hearing on April 18. The hearing was held by the Congressional-Executive Committee on China titled the "Implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act & the Global Supply Chain Impact."
At a House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee hearing, Democrats talked up their legislative proposals -- two bipartisan, two not -- as answers to confronting China's trade agenda, and expressed skepticism of witnesses' advocacy for ending permanent normal trade relations with China, while some Republicans expressed interest in that approach, and one seemed cautious.
CBP is looking to expand the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (CTPAT) to include e-commerce, agency officials said at the 2023 Trade Facilitation and Cargo Security Summit on April 18. As part of that effort, CBP has begun to have conversations with a subsection of members of the Section 321 data pilot to better understand e-commerce and how it compares with a traditional supply chain, Bryant Van Buskirk, director of CBP's Los Angeles CTPAT Office, said.
When most people think of counterfeits in the U.S., they think of luxury fashion -- purses and watches -- but CBP also is concerned about safety issues from counterfeit medicines, sunscreen, baby formula and poorly made electronics whose lithium-ion batteries can cause fires.
Audience members looking for answers on how to navigate the rebuttable presumption of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act got no answers from a panel on human rights and "responsible business conduct," though they were told that if Sheffield Hallam University researchers can uncover links to forced labor in supply chains, it's not that hard for businesses to do the same.
Almost half of de minimis shipments last year were covered either by the Type 86 entry test or the Section 321 data pilot program, CBP said, but that doesn't mean that the government has a good grasp on what merchandise is entering in small packages.