Why Trump Ending De Minimis Will Keep All of Us Safer
Truly, no one liked this policy. It's good that it's gone.
In August of 2022, I visited the Customs and Border Protection office at the Newark air and marine port for a personal tour from several CBP officers.
Newark is the fifth-busiest airport in the country, and second-busiest seaport after Los Angeles. Looking east toward Newark Bay, I could see the marine port, bristling with candy-striped cranes unloading containers from the towering ships. Ten to twenty ships arrive here per day, and around twelve thousand containers per day flow through all six marine ports under the purview of this Customs office. Looking south, I could see airplanes floating down from the sky to land at Newark Airport. This is the largest US port that combines air and sea, which was useful for me, since I wanted to see how the process for handling those differed—what with the rise of online shopping and all.
Earlier that year, I had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, asking for information on all the chemical tests it had done on shipments of fashion products going back to 2012. I wanted to understand what, if anything, the CPSC was doing to protect Americans from toxic products. According to the document I got, the CPSC, with help from the port officers at Customs and Border Protection, tests a fashion shipment on average every couple of days. Not bad, until you think about the fact that the United States’ nine largest ports got more than 138,000 shipping containers of goods per day in 2021, and the US as a whole imported the equivalent of 94 billion square meters of apparel a year. According to the data I got from the CPSC, out of the 3,462 shipments tested over a decade, they seized a third.
Here’s how it works. Seventy-two hours before the ship arrives, Customs receives a manifest listing all the containers and their contents, and they cross-check it against their database, looking for clues that it might have some sort of contraband. Most shipments are just fine, sailing through the radiation detector (to check for dirty bombs) and heading off to a store near you. But if Customs has a suspicion, or a request from another federal agency like the CPSC to take a closer look, the shipping container gets sidelined and taken to a warehouse, officially called a Centralized Examination Station. There, a mobile X‑ray drives down the row of containers, scanning them to look for anomalies. Then they’re unloaded into the warehouse for a closer look.
Customs officers don’t do the unloading themselves—the warehouse staff does. When I asked them about hazardous fumes coming out of the shipping containers, they all said it hadn’t happened in recent memory. But in other countries such as New Zealand and the Netherlands, shipping containers have shown up treated with dangerous fumigants such as ethylene oxide and methyl bromide, the latter of which has been known to send workers at other ports to the hospital with seizures. The containers can also have products such as plastic that off-gas formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, and other carcinogens at levels above government workplace standards. A 2017 Swedish study called out shoes in particular, with one container having 1,2‑Dichloroethane at thirty times the occupational exposure limits, and benzene at seventeen times the limits.
The officers took me over to the huge warehouse where goods are examined, and walked me over to a folding display table to show off some of the things they had prevented from coming into the country: a cotton polyester quilt connected to forced labor in China, counterfeit Starbucks-branded earbud chargers with lead paint, fake Air Jordans, a giant plastic lollipop with lead (in the stick, not the candy itself), a mattress that was tested for flammability and released, an unsafe horseback riding helmet, and a truly terrifying clown bong. A china cabinet held fake Gucci, Birkin, and Chanel bags, and fake perfumes.
Seeing the kinds of things on the table confirmed what I knew: the CPSC tests only children’s products for toxic substances and looks for only three: lead, cadmium, and phthalates.
Counterfeits are a huge deal at this port. Often, when the Consumer Product Safety Commission asks Customs to target a shipment, Customs has already flagged the same one. Though a 2021 report by the Buy Safe America Coalition estimates that CBP intercepted only a small fraction of counterfeits, the total value of counterfeit goods from China alone in 2019 was close to $45.5 billion.
And yes, counterfeit items are often dangerous. They’re flammable, have a choking hazard, or are filled with lead. In 2024, CBP seized counterfeit vape pens made with power-steering chemicals.
Counterfeits led to an estimated $54.1 billion in lost sales for domestic retailers, plus 283,400 retail jobs and 39,860 wholesale jobs.
Think about that. 39,000 people who were working with factories to ensure you’re getting a beautifully made purse that matches the picture and the designer’s vision. 283,000 people who no longer work at the local store, bringing you armfuls of dresses in various sizes until you found the perfect one that made you feel like a movie star. Where are those people now? Unemployed? Doomscrolling on Instagram and Shein?
That’s counterfeits. But what about shipments from retailers that are real, but do nothing for chemical safety? Is anyone opening that shipping container, taking a whiff and saying, “Oof, we need to send this for testing before we release it”?
No. With the sheer volume of goods flowing through the port, they have to trust that “legitimate trade”— that is, products imported by large brands—meets all the legal requirements. “Let’s say, 99.9 percent of the trade is legitimate; it’s that 0.1 percent that we’re looking for,” said Anthony Bucci, the public affairs specialist who provided the tour. “So we can’t hold up the economic engine of the United States, but we have an enforcement responsibility.”
The De Minimis Loophole
This customs process is a lot less leisurely for the air cargo examination facility.
I couldn’t visit that part, and there was nothing to see at lunchtime on a Wednesday anyway. There, officers work through the night to examine and release air cargo from FedEx and DHL, which have promised three-day delivery for things as unimportant as a pair of fuzzy socks. That warehouse has a lot less time to deal with what has become a deluge of slippery plastic polybags pouring through the airport.
Since 2016, when Congress raised the de minimis on shipments from $200 to $800, air shipments of small packages have exploded. Essentially, anything worth less than $800 doesn’t go through the same process of Customs scrutiny and is not charged import duties.
De minimis was initially meant to allow travelers to bring home souvenirs, and makers to ship samples. But it became a way for sketchy foreign factories to skirt the safety and ethical rules imposed by traditional retailers, and ship their (often complete garbage) product straight to American consumers.
Brands like Shein locate their fulfillment warehouses right over the border in Mexico and Canada to avoid shipping anything into the United States that is worth more than $800. China’s de minimis limit is $7, or more than one hundred times less than ours.
Imagine: you can fit eighty or more items from Shein into one box before it will undergo even the basic check that a shipping container filled with the same item would. “That means that they can bring things in without the same restrictions that they would have previously had,” another customs office said. “I think it makes it just a bit of a challenge for us; we need to alter the approach that we take to protect the public and make sure that we’re able to ensure that e‑commerce flourishes.”
But even Bucci told me he bought some travel clothing off a Facebook ad before his big family trip to Italy earlier that year. It was garbage quality, of course. He donated the items to Goodwill without wearing them.
Meanwhile, the EU now issues recalls or destroys incoming fashion products every week. When I checked its public toxic product notices in May 2020, I found fluffy baby shoes with excessive hexavalent chromium, a red feather-encrusted sweater containing restricted azo dyes, and a pair of blue-and-yellow flip-flops that had a panoply of chemicals: chlorinated paraffins, lead, and three different kinds of phthalates. Most of these were from cheap little brands, but the EU has recalled sunglasses by Bvlgari, Burberry, and Calvin Klein for excessive nickel; Under Armour face masks for containing a suspected carcinogen; and a Scotch & Soda suede jacket for excessive chromium.
This is the kind of protection American consumers want.
The Toxic Products De Minimis Favors
Defenders of de minimis say it gave consumers access to cheap products and helped “small foreign firms.” That latter category encompasses a lot: small makers in Europe shipping you a $300 Scottish wool sweater, and a sweatshop in China shipping you a $12 PVC skirt that smells like chemicals.
I actually bought a few things from an ultrafast fashion brand to see the process for myself. It came with Chinese lettering on the shipping label and said it contained one vest, which was a lie. (A “mismanifest,” Customs and Border Protection would call it.) It actually came with two sparkly tanks and two pleather miniskirts. When a friend (who is sensitive to scents) came over to visit, I showed it to her. I unzipped a polybag, inhaling the scent like I was checking for a dirty diaper. “Woof,” I said, handing it to her. She smelled it. “Ugh, that’s vinyl all right,” she said, recoiling. She gently coughed, covering her mouth. “It’s affecting me,” she said. “I feel it in my chest. I’m getting phlegmy.”
I paid $1,579 to get that miniskirt tested by the Hohenstein lab, which supports the Oeko-Tex non-toxic certification. The miniskirt that caused my friend’s reaction turned up formaldehyde close to the limit, 9 ppm of antimony, .07 ppm of tetraethyltin, and .01 ppm of DMF. Tetraethyltincan can cause breathing problems and the OSHA limit is .1 ppm over the course of the workday, right above what was in the skirt. (Repeated exposure to this organotin can also cause brain damage.)
Why is this allowed? Even worse, why is this incentivized by de minimis exceptions? It should be more expensive to import toxic crap, and less expensive to import quality products.
So in my 2023 book To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick — and How We Can Fight back, one of my policy recommendations was to close the de minimis loophole.
Breaking the Addiction
The de minimis deluge only got worse in the past two of years. In 2024, 1.4 billion individual packages (4 million a day) came flowing into the U.S. with no tariffs or checks on what they actually were.
Legislators proposed bills to close it. The Biden administration issued some new guidelines but barely got the process started before he left office.
On August 29th, that loophole was officially closed by the current administration. Small packages will now be subject to tariffs, shippers will have to prepare customs declarations, and carriers like UPS are tacking on fees between $2.50 and $20.
It’s not like this has been rolled out well. Oh no. Many mail carriers like DHS, the UK’s Royal Post, France’s La Poste, and Correos de Mexico suspended shipments to the U.S., citing confusion on the new rules and how to follow them.
But even this chaotic transition is having a good effect. Customers who formerly could play the addictive slot machine of see, click, buy on hyper cheap, toxic goods straight from China are now getting slapped with duties or higher prices, and switching from Shein, Temu, Amazon, and Walmart to safer retailers like Bloomingdale’s, Kohl’s, Nordstrom Rack, Aéropostale, and Old Navy.
Packages that went fast by air freight, which is very carbon-intensive, will be switched to slower shipping containers. That means it might no longer be possible to buy a product and have it arrive straight from China a week later. We’ll be back to buying a product that was made months ago and has already arrived to a distribution center or retailer. We will be buying a product with more thought, more testing, more care, more value.
As for the consumers “hurt” by this? Well, sure, American consumers have their addictions. But this policy is like deciding not to keep sugary junk food in the house. It’s healthy to put some friction and expense between you and toxic, polyester, throwaway fashion. Nobody wants to live like this, with slot-machine access to junk that individually cost almost nothing, but add up to a drained bank account and piles of plastic stuff clogging every room in the house. That’s a coping mechanism, not a life.
What would really be good for American consumers is knowing that when they buy something, it’s high quality and safe. Americans want to be able to start a small business without their craft being immediately duped by Shein.
We want good local jobs in our communities where we talk to real humans, as real humans. We want those jobs to pay fairly and have humane hours so we have time to cook meals and go to the farmers market. We want affordable housing, healthcare that won’t bankrupt us. We want to feel valued and respected.
Once we have those needs fulfilled, maybe we will no longer try to fill that hole with polyester crap from a slot machine.
I don’t believe any of that—good middle class jobs, affordable housing, healthcare for all—will happen under the current administration. I don’t even think chemical regulation will improve, at least not at the federal level.
But at least this particular toxic slot machine has been jammed.
Well I'm sitting here in Canada about to launch a business making made-to-measure beautiful shirts for women in only linen and organic cotton, or other sustainable materials, and have been struggling with having to charge the true cost of producing quality apparel in an ethical way and now this will add 35% to the cost for a U.S. customer. There are a huge amount of small and medium businesses in Canada, a formerly respected trading partner, that will feel this pain. It's likely we will lose customers in the US which is of course the major market for our goods. So, I see the benefits from your perspective but this whole mess with tariffs and your administration is wreaking havoc everywhere and especially affecting Canada. A better, and I know, unlikely approach would be for individuals everywhere to stop buying junk period. I think it's sad we have to use regulations like these that have unintended other consequences to prevent people from, as you say, harming themselves because they are addicted to cheap crap.
The Tariffs are making everything more expensive. The ending of de minimis is not going to stop fast fashion, or keep dangerous things out of this country. As the current administration is cutting back in all areas that would even inspect incoming goods. And some other countries do already use some form of de minimis. Many of the brands that are recommended by you are not located in the US, so it is difficult for me to see how see ending de minimis as a good thing? This of course is my opinion. Thank you.