Joe Biden’s Mail-Ordered Counterfeit, Slave Labor Goods, and Illicit Drugs Crisis

Joe Biden helped start it, and how President Trump can end it.

America has struggled with counterfeit for quite some time, even dating back to the Revolutionary War. But, this problem got exponentially worse thanks to globalist elites like Joe Biden who helped liberalize a law called the De Minimis Value threshold. The De Minimis threshold aims to ensure packages imported into the United States match what they are labeled as, and that the value of goods shipped is declared correctly, especially because certain imported goods are subject to tariffs. However, after De Minimis was liberalized, the amount of counterfeit, slave labor made goods, and illicit drugs flowing over our border, particularly from China, drastically increased. President Trump took substantial action to undo this damage and save American lives during his first term, and he has the power to finish the job during his second term.

Dating back to the Tariff Act of 1789, all imported goods faced inspection at U.S. ports because they were subject to customs tariffs in order to protect local industries, economies and businesses. However, as international trade expanded and transportation evolved beyond just boats and horses, more goods began to enter the U.S from overseas. To prevent federal agents from having to inspect an overwhelming amount of packages, especially seemingly insignificant ones such as gifts or souvenirs, in 1938, the U.S. Congress passed the first De Minimis law. De Minimis, which literally means “too trivial or minor to merit consideration,” represents a U.S. dollar threshold to determine whether an imported package requires an inspection upon entry or not.

The first De Minimis value thresholds for imported packages were set at $5 and $1. At the time, inspections were deemed necessary for gifts and personal items mailed to the United States or that travelers brought with them valued no more than $5 USD or $106 USD in today’s currency, and $1 for all other goods—approximately $21 USD today. Any items valued more than these thresholds had to be inspected thoroughly, and tariffs and fees would be collected by the federal government accordingly. This threshold gradually increased over the next several decades.

When the Cold War ended in the 1990’s with the United States emerging as the world’s superpower, globalism and globalist policy, especially impacting trade, became the new norm in an effort to harmonize the world and prevent another rise of communism. However, as we now know, globalist trade policy did nothing but fuel slave labor especially in countries like China, while eroding America’s industrial base. A prime example of this was the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was signed by Bill Clinton and supported by then-Senator Joe Biden.

De Minimis, too, was negatively impacted by NAFTA, as various changes were made to increase the value threshold. The De Minimis value threshold for gifts, which was then $50 USD, was increased to $100 USD. The threshold for accompanying articles, or personal items carried by travelers typically for household use, was increased from $25 USD to $200 USD. Lastly, the threshold for general merchandise—i.e., any other kind of item—was raised from $5 USD to $200 USD. This put American industry at a tremendous disadvantage, because importing goods became cheaper financially. U.S. citizens could order goods from foreign vendors worth up to $200 without paying any tariffs or fees. However, citizens living in countries with significantly lower De Minimis thresholds were discouraged from importing goods from countries like ours because they would face tariffs or fees of their own.

In 2015, President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden signed the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of (TFTEA) which eliminated the distinction between general merchandise, express, and postal shipments, and raised the De Minimis threshold for all imported goods from $200 to $800. Following this, e-commerce sales began to exponentially increase in the United States. After the 2008 Recession, e-commerce retail sales increased steadily each year by approximately 13% to 20% annually. And, this wasn’t just about the rise of Amazon and eBay. Chinese online marketplaces, for example, Alibaba, Temu, Shein, and most recently, TikTok Shop, began to explode. Recently, China surpassed the United States as the largest market for e-commerce in 2021, and is responsible for 50% of all retail sales in the world. Chinese e-commerce marketplace platform, Shein, rose tenfold to $466 billion as of May 2023, surpassing Amazon in the United States in app downloads.

Now, one may ask, what’s so bad about Chinese e-commerce platforms in regard to De Minimis? Well, Chinese online marketplaces like Shein, Temu, and Tik Tok have built their entire business operations around the United States’ lax De Minimis law to export counterfeit, cheap, slave labor made goods, and drugs to Americans, because they arrive in packages that are valued under the $800 De Minimis threshold. The problem has gotten so bad that Shein and Temu don’t even sell their products in China, because the U.S. market has been robustly sustaining their business.

Along with the rise of Chinese e-commerce in the United States came a rapid increase of counterfeit goods and the prevalence of highly potent online-ordered drugs, particularly deadly fentanyl, being sent to Americans. For example, between 2003—the earliest CBP data available regarding counterfeit goods seizures—and 2015, right before the De Minimis threshold was raised to $800, CBP counterfeit goods seizures rose from $94 million in value to $1.3 billion After the threshold was raised by Obama and Biden, counterfeit goods seizures nearly doubled to $2.3 billion in value by 2022.

During his first term as president, Joe Biden has done nothing to crack down on this issue, which he helped create. In fact, he’s made it worse, particularly for America’s steel workers and shipbuilders. This past August, Joe Biden signed a waiver that prioritized foreign manufacturing over American manufacturing called the Waiver of Buy America Requirements for De Minimis Costs and Small Grants. This enables federal contractors to import foreign materials—including steel and iron—to build federally-funded transportation projects below $500,000 in value. As Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin noted about the waiver, more than 25% of all awards in the Small Shipyard Grant Program are valued at less than $500,000 since 2008, so this waiver completely undermines pre-existing Buy American policies to ensure that tax dollars used for shipbuilding are used to purchase American-made products and support American workers and businesses.

The Trump Administration’s approach to De Minimis was that the private sector is more than capable of selling legitimate goods to American consumers for our country’s economic and national security, so the federal government should ensure that third-party marketplaces abide by the same standards. In April 2019, President Trump signed the Memorandum on Combating Trafficking in Counterfeit and Pirated Goods which directed federal agencies to submit a report to the President on how online and third-party marketplaces are used to import and sell counterfeit and illicit goods to Americans, provided appropriate guidance to the private sector as to how to crack down on nefarious activity like this occurring on their platforms.

Resulting from the executive order, several federal agencies including CBP and key advisors of the President, including Dr. Peter Navarro, initiated “Operation Mega Flex” to examine 20,000 packages from China and Hong Kong between July and September 2019 in order to catalogue the amount of contraband seized. The operation revealed a total of 1,061 shipments of counterfeit products including fake name brand clothing items, sports equipment made with faulty parts, drug paraphernalia, deadly opioids, and counterfeit drivers’ licenses. CBP also seized 174 different kinds of controlled or prohibited substances during the operation, including: LSD, cocaine, DMT, ecstasy, marijuana, mushrooms, poppy pods, steroids and highly addictive painkillers like Tramadol.

To crack down on slave labor imports flowing into the United States, President Trump’s CBP issued nine separate Withhold Release Orders (WRO)s directing CBP to detain a shipments of goods produces by specific Chinese entities, for example, internment camps and manufacturing companies that utilize Uighur forced labor. January 2021, President Trump’s CBP also issued a region-wide WRO against all cotton products produced in and all products that contain components from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in January 2021.

President Trump could end Joe Biden’s mail-ordered counterfeit, slave labor goods, and illicit drugs crisis, and he would do so by banning the De Minimis threshold altogether during his second term. The United States currently maintains the highest De Minimis threshold out of any country in the entire world, and as a result, is sent the most counterfeit, slave labor made goods, and illicit drugs via mail. Drastically reducing the De Minimis threshold or reciprocating De Minimis thresholds to other countries’ thresholds as Congress has proposed recently may help eliminate illicit fentanyl shipments to Americans, however, not counterfeit and slave labor shipments, as those goods can be priced as low as $8. Therefore, to stop all counterfeit, slave labor made goods, and harmful drugs from entering our country, the De Minimis threshold has to be eviscerated altogether.

S. Karol Paul has an extensive background in trade and manufacturing policy and is a contributor to Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America

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