Hours after Compact Magazine published the piece, below, by the director of AELP’s Rethink Trade program, Lori Wallach, Pres. Trump reversed plans to close a major trade loophole, allowing four million packages of imports daily to continue to evade tariffs and inspections when shipped directly to U.S. consumers, mainly from China. Wallach’s piece on the de minimis loophole explains how Trump’s initial action had ended duty-free access for low-value Chinese imports purchased online, but had failed to remedy the evasion of Customs requirements so millions of packages could still arrive daily without inspections, which would provide fentanyl traffickers an ongoing flood of uninspected packages in which they could bury their deadly imports.
