There are now 107 companies flagged by U.S. regulators for using forced labor or sourcing materials from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, with the inclusion of 29 more companies, DHS said.
Joanna Marsh
Joanna Marsh, Assistant Editor, International Trade Today, joined Warren Communications News in 2024 after covering the supply chain from the transportation angle for a decade. At ITT, she covers U.S. import compliance and import regulations related to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and partnering governing agencies. She has covered the U.S. and Canadian freight railroads for FreightWaves, and she has also written about maritime transport trends, climate change, and AI and machine learning trends for publications such as Railway Age, Transport Topics, Breakbulk Magazine and the Freight Business Journal of North America. She also worked the U.S. coal markets beat for Argus Media.
The number of shipments stopped in October by CBP because of concerns over forced labor rose on a year-over-year and sequential basis, even though the value of those stopped shipments decreased over those same periods, according to CBP data.
The CEO of footwear company Steve Madden expects to reduce its imports from China and increase sourcing from other regions to hedge against proposed punitive tariffs on China by President-elect Donald Trump.
As Donald Trump returns to the White House in January, a short-term spike in import volumes at U.S. ports is inevitable, given the president-elect's strident stance on tariffs, some logistics experts say.
The CBP has finally let customs brokers know how many continuing education (CE) credits they must earn and when they can start earning them so that they can maintain their broker licenses.
DHS has updated its Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List to include textile companies that allegedly use forced labor or source material from the Xinjiang autonomous region in China, and it removed one entity from one category of alleged violations and placed it in another category, according to a Federal Register notice.
CBP recently held that a teleprompter base is properly classified as an article of aluminum rather than as a part of an electrical machine, upholding an August 2022 ruling after an importer requested reconsideration.
CBP will bolster a number of existing initiatives in the coming months aimed at preventing the import of products made with forced labor, said Katie Woodson, assistant director within the operations and forced labor divisions of CBP's Office of Trade, during a panel on forced labor at last week's Western Cargo Conference.
Rope-coiled decorative baskets imported by Kohl's are generally classified as made-up textile articles, rather than as ropes, and an especially large version of one of the baskets is big enough to be classified as furniture, CBP said in a Sept. 27 customs ruling.
SAN DIEGO -- As brokers and their clients rely more and more on online methods and the cloud to conduct customs operations and everyday business, they should be aware that it’s practically inevitable that a cyberattack will one day hit them, panelists said at the Pacific Coast Council’s Western Cargo Conference (WESCCON) last week.