By Jacob Bogage, Jaclyn Peiser · The Washington Post (c) 2025
The U.S. Postal Service on Wednesday abruptly reversed its decision to block inbound package shipments from China and Hong Kong just hours after implementing the suspension.
President Donald Trump allowed a tariff increase of 10 percentage points on Chinese imports to take effect Tuesday morning after backing off plans to levy duties on Canada and Mexico. Beijing responded with retaliatory measures including 15 percent tariffs on imports of U.S. coal, liquefied natural gas, agricultural equipment and other goods.
The Postal Service said Tuesday it would stop mail and packages coming from China and Hong Kong, but less than 24 hours later said it would continue to accept such shipments.
“The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery,” a Postal Service spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday.
The vast majority of goods shipped from China arrive outside the mail system, but Trump’s order specifically eliminated a “de minimis” tariff exemption for small quantities of items and low-value items, including those shipped through a postal service. That exemption covered items worth less than $800.
The mail agency’s move stood toblock or delay, at least temporarily, parcels from retailers including Shein and Temu and some from Amazon.
It could also have posed significant delays for items mailed from China to the United States and driven up shipping costs, said Kate Muth, executive director of the International Mailers Advisory Group, a leading industry association that represents shippers and logistics firms.
“The expectation is you’ll be paying more as a consumer, and it may take a little longer to reach you,” she said.
Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, responded to the suspension by urging the United States to “stop politicizing economic and trade issues.” At a news briefing Wednesday, he said: “China will continue to take necessary measures to firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.”
Temu and Shein are responsible for an estimated 30 percent of packages shipped daily into the United States, according to a report from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Nearly half of all de minimis shipments originate in China, according to a House Republican congressional report.
Some trade experts argue that these apps have driven a surge in imports since fiscal year 2015, when the number of de minimis entries hovered at about 139 million, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Between that fiscal year and 2023, the number of de minimis exceptions increased by over 600 percent. By 2024, it had surged to 1.36 billion.
President Joe Biden took steps to curb de minimis imports during the final weeks of his administration, but those rules were not set to take effect until after a weeks-long rulemaking process. Trump’s de minimis moves caught customs officials and importers off-guard, according to two people familiar with the rapid series of events, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive commercial details.
Had the China and Hong Kong mail suspension remained in effect, the Postal Service would have had towork with its Chinese counterparts to put in place new de minimis customs screening procedures, Muth said. “It’s totally upended the industry, and folks are kind of scrambling to comply and still have a lot of questions about how it’s going to work,” she said.
Logistics experts said some sellers may already be charging U.S. customers an estimated duty fee at checkout, as the Postal Service figures out how to levy the new tariffs.
“The deadline is the deadline, which has already passed,” said Brian Bourke, chief commercial officer at Seko Logistics. “Any packages that have already arrived are now subject to duties.”
Some companies, however, may hold off on making decisions about adding customer fees or moving their operations to other countries because they are not sure how long the tariffs will last or if they will be increased.
“There’s still uncertainty, and that’s probably the biggest challenge for brands,” Bourke said.
Spokespeople from the Postal Service and Amazon – whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post – declined to comment Tuesday.
“President Trump is ensuring that China can no longer avoid applicable tariffs simply by exporting packages with relatively low values,” Rep. Jason T. Smith (R-Missouri), the House Ways and Means Committee chair, said in a statement Tuesday, before the Postal Service reversed course.
“The Ways and Means Committee has spent significant time investigating the use of de minimis by China and other nations to undermine our trade enforcement tariffs and skirt compliance with U.S. law. The effect of increased abuse of the de minimis privilege has been to deny the U.S. Government collection of billions of dollars in additional revenues while unfairly disadvantaging American manufacturers.”
Representatives of the Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for commentTuesday.
Lawmakers from both parties have for years talked of overhauling the de minimis tariff exemption. But Democrats on Tuesday said they worried Trump’s rollout was sloppy and could disrupt portions of the e-commerce market.
“The one consistency of Trump’s trade war is the lack of foresight. This would be easily avoidable if anyone knew what they were doing and proves yet again why our trade policy must come from the Congress,” Rep. Richard E. Neal (Massachusetts), the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Post.
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Caroline O’Donovan, Vic Chiang, Shannon Najmabadi and Aaron Gregg contributed to this report.