The last I read, de minimis still applied. I didn’t know until now that was done with.
You can blame companies like Temu for putting a spotlight on de minimis. Their entire business model was built around exploiting de minimis to never pay any taxes. Rather than importing a single shipping container valued above the de minimis amount, they list it as like 10000 individual items, each under the de minimis limit.
It was overwhelming port authorities who didn’t have the manpower to handle that much paperwork for what should have been listed as a single shipment. The tariffs originally didn’t touch de minimis, but then the feds noticed that companies were essentially evading tariffs by only shipping low value items.
You can blame companies like Temu for putting a spotlight on de minimis. Their entire business model was built around exploiting de minimis to never pay any taxes. Rather than importing a single shipping container valued above the de minimis amount, they list it as like 10000 individual items, each under the de minimis limit.
It was overwhelming port authorities who didn’t have the manpower to handle that much paperwork for what should have been listed as a single shipment. The tariffs originally didn’t touch de minimis, but then the feds noticed that companies were essentially evading tariffs by only shipping low value items.