Customs Law

This is a good week to be talking about trade with the Middle East. I am talking about trade in goods, which is what I do. I don't talk about immigration issues. That's too bad because yesterday was a doozy of day in the history of immigration law in America. Congratulations to the ACLU  and everyone who helped secure a stay of the President's order barring entry for people from seven majority-Muslim countries (including those already holding green cards and visas). That was a tremendous effort at ensuring the rule of law, not to mention humane treatment for people who had the bad luck of being on a plane at the moment he signed the order. There were many examples of lawyers showing up at airports around the country to help stranded travelers. Some of them were affiliated with the International Refugee Assistance Project . Both the ACLU and IRAP deserve your support. That said, I will focus on something entirely superficial: the customs treatment of mewakh pipes. Fro...

Note, this has been updated to add a little more context for those among you who are not trade compliance professionals. Lately, I have been on a slow binge of watching the Walking Dead. Like most TV adaptations of graphic novels and comics, I am finding it very entertaining. I'm only in Season 3, so no one tell me . . . well, anything. As a result, I have been seeing a lot of images of corpses, both animate and inanimate. That reminded me that there is a specific provision in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States ("HTSUS") for the importation of corpses. The HTSUS is the statute (19 USC 1202) by which imported products are assigned rates of duty. It also sets out certain other regulatory requirements and exceptions. General Note 3(e), HTSUS, exempts from customs duties "corpses, together with their coffins and accompanying flowers." When goods arrive at a port in the U.S., they are usually subject to an "entry." That is the process...

Generally, I stay away from news involving Customs and Border Protection personnel behaving badly. There is no point in covering it as it does nothing to explain customs law and could conceivably make a bad situation worse for someone I might have to deal with in the future. So, it works both ways: its polite and it prevents future hassles for me. I'm going to make a general exception here, without going into details. The first reason is that a loyal reader tipped me to the story. This indicates that it has some level of interest in the community. Second, it illustrates that the reality of compliance is often not the same as the government's abstract notion of compliance. The story is that a CBP employee has been charged with employing an undocumented worker to clean her home. It is pretty clear that the CBP employee knew the legal status of the worker because the CBP employee advised the worker not to leave the county and try and re-enter. Here is the full story . In the first...

Customs and Border Protection in Newark detained British author Sebastian Horsley for eight hours before telling him that he was not welcome in the U.S. under the visa waiver program. The reason for this determination is that Horsely purports to be a drug user who has employed the services of prostitutes and also has worked as an "escort." According to the U.S., this amounts to moral turpitude and makes him inadmissible without a visa. Read the New York Times story on Horsley's blog . Among the interesting questions this raises is who in CBP gets to decide what constitutes a moral failing? Is it based on community standards or do we know moral turpitude when we see it? A somewhat more interesting question is what happens to Horsley and to CBP if it turns out that his literary persona is, in fact, more fiction than fact? Although the quotes in the article are coy in an Oscar Wilde sort of way, the clear implication is that his memoir is embellished. Consequently, Horsley ...