Northern Border Travel Ban Led to Big Increase in Cargo Drug Seizures, CTPAT Director Says

The ongoing northern border travel ban seems to be leading to a growth in drug seizures found within cargo shipments, said Manuel Garza, Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism program director in CBP's Office of Field Operations. “On a normal given year, I could probably count five seizures on the northern border with drugs,” he told the American Association of Exporters and Importers conference June 29. “This past year during COVID, we're probably up to 100, if not more than that,” he said.

Those seizures mainly involve marijuana coming in by truck from Canada to the U.S., he said. “The drugs have always been coming, but as less people were crossing the border, they had to start looking at other ways of moving their drugs and they started moving it through the commercial environment, which is what we started catching,” he said. The travel restrictions on northern and southern borders were recently extended through July 21 (see 2106220017).

The planned addition of forced labor requirements with CTPAT (see 2106250045) is meant to address a number of gaps that exist within industry's knowledge of the supply chain, he said. “Companies do not know where the components that are used in the final product that they are building or making are coming from,” Garza said. That isn't surprising, since CBP “never asked companies to know that,” he said. “We never told companies that you need to know where the cotton is grown. We never told you that you need to know what fishing vessel caught the fish and in what water.”

Companies are starting to recognize they need to start figuring out where the raw components are coming from, Garza said. “For a small company, it may not be that difficult if they only have a couple of products, but for large corporations that have hundreds of products and each product having hundreds of pieces that make it, it's going to be a tough challenge.”

It is also impossible to know what the focus of any future withhold release orders will be, Garza said. “Today, it's cotton, tomatoes, wigs, tuna fish. Tomorrow, it could be plastic, it could be leather, it could be wood, it could be a number of things. It's ever-changing, so I think companies just need to start trying to address it.” CBP is learning from industry days about the technologies available to help with component tracing “so that we can help provide best practices for companies as they continue to try and fight the forced labor epidemic.”

A new CTPAT portal is expected to be released in November, Garza said. “I just got an email today, as a matter of fact, telling me that they are ready for us to start identifying some companies that are in CTPAT that would like to test the external system,” he said. Garza described it as a “brand new platform, and so we want to make sure the trade has some tangible feedback.”