Airport community systems: can they put all the pieces together?
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Preparing US customs systems for the end of the US de minimis exemption on imports from China will likely take longer than the 30-day respite announced by President Trump, according to the founder of Clearit Customs Brokers, Adam Lewis.
President Trump recently paused his decision to end the de minimis concession until 1 April, when it would be reviewed with recommendations from federal agencies.
But yesterday, Mr Lewis predicted it would take “longer than 30 days” to prepare, as the most likely reason for the suspension in the first place was “the strain it put on the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency”.
He said: “This added millions of shipments per day that had to be reviewed, and they simply don’t have, or did not have, the systems and processes in place to be able to do that properly.
“The US CBP is going to have to make significant upgrades to the systems and processes to be able to handle that,” he added.
Indeed, Milena Milenkovic, Flexport’s Benelux airfreight manager, said she could not think of “any country in the world that has the capacity to process an annual 1bn packages with documentation and checks”.
Meanwhile, regardless of what transpires on 1 April, Mr Lewis said shippers would not look to “shake up their supply chain right away”, due to the yo-yoing associated with executive orders on tariffs and Customs.
“This is very much kind of like a moving target. If Trump does cancel the de minimis, for how long? You won’t want to make such drastic changes to your supply chain right away.
“I think in the short term, [imports] are not necessarily going to dry up. Some of those costs will be absorbed by both the shipper and US consignee,” he predicted.
However, Mr Lewis added that “compliance may become an issue”. he said: “It will be more difficult, more expensive, and more time consuming.”
Referring to the US $800 de minimis exemption at the 2025 World Cargo Summit, Nikolai Schaffner, VP ecommerce at Swissport, said: “I’m not worried, to put it very bluntly. There are certain barriers to moving the big goalpost.
“I also don’t think there’s necessarily a political rationale behind going after ecommerce. Even if you have a very protectionist industrial policy as a US administration, I think you would prioritise insourcing the manufacturing of the types of goods that are to be sold over ecommerce.
“I think that might focus on bringing back car production, obviously microchips… ecommerce, I don’t think is going to be a relevant political target.”
If you’re also interested in ocean freight, why not listen to the most recent episode of The Loadstar Podcast?
Comment on this article
Cindy Allen
February 13, 2025 at 5:42 pmWhat these concerns fail to recognize is that CBP is already processing all of these shipments through ACE. If the shipment is by air there is an ACAS filing, if by ocean there is an ISF filing, all shipments are manifested (and at the individual house bill level), and then there is a the release request. The only additional information the ACE system will have to accept is the entry summary process for informal and formal entries. And likely shipments will stop being manifested at the individual package level, so that volume will be reduced.
The real issue that I see is how the shipments arriving via the postal service will be processed. There is no automated or streamlined ability for these shipments to make entry and pay duty. Right now if a formal entry arrives in the postal system, the consignee is contacted and asked who their customs broker is. There is not an ability to do that for the million packages that arrive every day.
If you look at the actual language of the EO again allowing de minimis, it talks about delaying until systems are in place to collect the duty. The only place a system isn’t in place is postal. How will they address that? Who knows. Will the postal service appoint a customs broker? Will they obtain a system to do it themselves? Will they assess a flat rate of duty? That will drive the timelines.