If you’re waiting on a package from another country - there’s now a chance it might just get thrown away before it makes it to you.
Trump’s war on the de minimis exemption is exactly what it looks like - a tantrum disguised as trade policy. It’s been a month since he killed it, and the result is chaos. Packages are piling up at customs hubs, UPS says it’s “disposing of” some of them, and people have everything from Japanese books to engagement rings stuck in limbo - or gone - because nobody knows what the new rules even are.
The de minimis exemption wasn’t some shady loophole. It’s been around since 1938, letting small packages into the U.S. without duties or mountains of paperwork. It started at $1 and got raised to $800 in 2016 so customs could focus on big-ticket imports instead of wasting time collecting $5 on a $50 pair of shoes. By 2024, CBP was handling 4 million of these shipments a day - efficiently, I might add. Then Trump decided it was a scam and nuked it on a month’s notice.
Now almost every package coming into the U.S. needs full customs paperwork and tariff calculations. The rates vary wildly by country and product - 10% from Britain, 50% from India, and endless variations in between. Customs can’t process it, shippers can’t track it, sellers can’t comply with it, and consumers sure as hell can’t understand it.
The whole system collapsed instantly.
UPS has started “disposing of” packages - and won’t say what that actually means. Some tracking notices just say “it has been destroyed.” People are watching their orders vanish in tracking purgatory, replaced by cryptic updates that say their goods were “removed from the UPS network.” A tea importer has more than $127,000 worth of shipments stuck in UPS limbo. The owner of a Swedish glassware company was told two of her packages would be destroyed. Regular customers lost sentimental items and personal belongings. UPS claims more than 90% of packages clear on day one, which could still mean thousands sit in limbo every day.
The administration claims this is about stopping fentanyl smuggling. Sure. Except CBP’s own numbers show about 96% of the fentanyl it seized in fiscal 2024 was caught at the southern land border, not in the mail. So this isn’t about drugs - it’s performative politics. Security theater with a body count made of broken dishes and lost heirlooms.
Other countries have stopped shipping to us altogether. A UK vendor showed a $769 customs fee on a $175 order. Korean beauty fans paid their tariffs and still had their products destroyed. The rest are being hit with nonsense “handling fees” that make $20 items cost $100 to deliver.
All this because someone decided an 87-year-old system needed to be “fixed” in a month, with no infrastructure ready for it. Instead of reforming it rationally, Trump torched the entire thing to prove a point. Now consumers are paying higher prices, importers are bleeding money, and foreign businesses are refusing to sell to Americans.
Just add this to the long list of extreme policy failures by the Trump admin. The de minimis exemption existed because it worked. It made trade smoother, saved the government money, and benefited everyone involved. Killing it was a self-inflicted wound - an unforced error from a man who thinks every problem can be solved with a headline.
The bottom line is that this is a customs crisis that will take months or years to unwind. Millions of packages destroyed or delayed. And a reminder that you can’t run global trade on ego and slogans.
Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said Trump killed the de minimis exemption overnight and without warning - he signed the order July 30th and it took effect August 29th. It also said a tea importer lost $127,000 in stock - her shipments were stuck, not lost - and that hundreds of thousands of UPS packages sit in limbo every day, when UPS’s own numbers point to thousands.
Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now say what UPS actually says about “disposing of” packages, that the Swedish glassware shipper was told her packages would be destroyed, that almost every package - not every one - now owes duties, and what CBP’s own numbers show about where fentanyl gets caught.