Tariff stacking 2026. A housewares importer priced a shipment of steel cookware out of China using the numbers from her last order, six months earlier. She landed the container and found her duty bill nearly double what she’d budgeted. Nothing about the product had changed. What changed was that a Section 232 derivative tariff had […]
Author Archives: Dieudonne
IEEPA tariff. A produce importer in Texas spent four months in 2025 filing paperwork to get his citrus shipments classified under an IEEPA exclusion code, convinced the exercise would save him money for years. It saved him money for exactly six months. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA never gave the president […]
First Sale Valuation Rule: Lower Your U.S. Customs Duty An apparel importer sourcing knitwear through a Hong Kong trading company assumed her duty bill was fixed the moment the factory in Cambodia quoted a price. Her broker classified the goods, CBP collected duty on the invoice from the trading company, and that was that, year […]
An importer can post a zero percent AD/CVD cash deposit on an entry and still owe six figures eighteen months later, once Commerce finishes reviewing the rate. That gap between what you pay at the border and what you eventually owe is the entire risk profile of antidumping and countervailing duty, and it catches small […]
A CBP Form 28 arrives with a 30-day clock already running, and nothing about the letter tells you that. It’s a one-page request, usually a handful of questions about an entry you filed weeks or months ago, and it rarely explains what happens if those questions go unanswered. For a small business importer running apparel, […]
FDA import detention food importer bringing in a container of packaged snacks through the Port of Long Beach got a call from her broker on a Wednesday afternoon: FDA had detained the shipment. She assumed, reasonably, that something was wrong with the product. Nothing was. FDA had flagged the entry based on a prior shipment […]
An apparel importer we picked up last spring had been paying full Section 301 duty on a line of packaging components for two years after those components qualified for an exclusion the entire time. Nobody caught it because nobody was checking. The broker filing the entries wasn’t wrong on classification. She just wasn’t cross-referencing HTS […]
A client running a cosmetics brand out of Torrance ships mascara tubes from a contract manufacturer in Shenzhen, forty to sixty cartons a week, each valued under $800. For two years her freight forwarder cleared everything as a standard Section 321 shipment with almost no paperwork. Then one week, three pallets sat at LAX for […]
CBP won’t release your cargo without a bond on file, and the amount isn’t something you get to guess at. There’s a formula, and getting it wrong in either direction costs you: too low, and CBP rejects the entry or demands a bond increase mid-shipment; too high, and you’re paying premium on coverage you don’t […]
A CF-29 lands in your inbox looking like a form, but it’s really a proposal from CBP to change how one of your entries was treated, and it comes with a clock attached. Ignore it or respond badly, and the proposed change becomes final. Respond correctly, and you can often keep your original classification, valuation, […]