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.

NEW ORLEANS -- The Agricultural Marketing Service plans to deploy new filing capabilities for organic inputs in the ACE certification environment for testing in May, with deployment to the ACE real time production environment to follow in June, Stacy Swartwood, who runs the agency’s Organic Integrity Database, said during a panel discussion April 24.

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NEW ORLEANS -- Submitting prior disclosures to CBP has recently been more “fraught,” and customs brokers need to consider all available options before advising their clients to move forward with the process, Heather Litman, a customs lawyer with Grunfeld Desiderio, said at the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America annual conference April 25.

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."

The House of Representatives intends to take a vote this week to overturn the administration's decision to delay collection of duties for antidumping and countervailing duty circumvention in the case of solar panels made with Chinese components coming from Southeast Asia.

CBP officials gave importers most of the credit for the quicker releases from detention when the government has decided there is no nexus to Xinjiang. In an interview in Boston on early implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, AnnMarie Highsmith, executive assistant commissioner of CBP's Office of Trade, said: "Importers are working harder to be prepared before their merchandise hits the water. They're learning their supply chains. They're simplifying their supply chains. I'd love to say it's us, but it's not. The importers are doing a better job."

The effect of benefits like Medicaid and child tax credits on worker supply were hotly debated at a field hearing convened by the House Ways and Means Committee in Peachtree City, Georgia, and there were many questions to business owner witnesses about the challenges of expiring tax provisions in the Trump tax cuts and about how inflation is affecting their profits and sales.

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.

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."