Trade Crime
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Trade crime is the deliberate, systematic abuse of U.S. trade laws to gain unlawful competitive advantage. Because it hides inside routine, paper-driven commerce, it scales easily and often goes unpunished. At scale, this becomes more than a compliance problem. It becomes a strategic vulnerability for the United States.
Re-industrialization, re-shoring, and tariffs mean little without proper trade enforcement.
This Study Guide gives current and future policymakers the foundation to understand modern trade crime: how it works, why the current system struggles to stop it, and how to think clearly about reform.
What You’ll Learn
The following Study Guide begins with first principles before moving into historical case studies, contemporary policy debates, and detailed policy debriefs. By the end of this Study Guide, you will be able to:
- Identify the four main forms of customs fraud: transshipment, undervaluation, misclassification, and smuggling.
- Explain why the Section 301 China tariff-collection gap reveals the scale of the problem.
- Understand how America’s import verification system was weakened over time.
- Diagnose the enforcement gap through two questions: how likely is detection and how certain are consequences when fraud is detected?
- Evaluate the four main reform categories: agency accountability, loophole closure, enforcement tools, and transparency.
This Study Guide was created in partnership with the Alliance for Trade EnforcementNOW, utilizing their interactive and continuously-updated online resource at enforcementnow.com.
Part I: What is it?
Online Report by Alliance for Trade Enforcement NOW
This is economic warfare. U.S. trade laws only matter when they are enforced. “Trade crime is the deliberate, systematic violation of U.S. trade laws to gain unlawful competitive advantage in cross-border trade—undermining fair competition, American workers, and national security.”
Four primary categories of fraud
(1) Customs Fraud: The deliberate evasion of U.S. customs duties or import restrictions through false origin, false value, false classification, or unlawful concealment.
- Transshipment. Routing goods through third countries to disguise origin and evade tariffs.
- Example: Tens of millions of dollars worth of Chinese-made quartz countertops routed through Malaysia and entered as non-Chinese — avoiding roughly 340% duties while paying about 27% in ordinary duties.
- Undervaluation. Declaring goods at a fraction of their real value to reduce duties.
- Example: A $200,000 shipment of Chinese apparel entered with a false invoice showing $50,000, incurring a duty only on 25% of the true value.
- Misclassification. Using incorrect HTS codes to qualify for lower duty rates.
- Example: Chinese high-grade aluminum subject to 400% duties enter the U.S. as “pallets” — claiming a finished-merchandise exclusion at a 2.5% rate.
- Smuggling. Bringing goods into the United States contrary to law by hiding them, omitting them from customs paperwork, or otherwise preventing Customs from seeing what is actually entering.
- Example: Counterfeit goods are hidden inside a container and left off the customs paperwork, so Customs is not told what is actually entering the country.
(2) Intellectual Property Theft: The illicit acquisition of protected know-how, through forced IP-sharing imposed on U.S. companies operating in China, state-sponsored cyber theft, or blatant appropriation by competitors. U.S. losses from Chinese IP theft alone run into the hundreds of billions per year.
(3) Forced Labor: Work exacted under coercion through threat, debt, or restriction of movement, prohibited in U.S. supply chains under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930. Enforcement depends on traceability that most global supply chains were never built to provide.
This guide focuses on customs fraud as a matter of enforcement design. IP theft and forced labor are equally serious but are not covered in this module.
Study Questions
How do transshipment, undervaluation, misclassification and smuggling each work — and why is each difficult to detect in routine review?
What makes “deliberate, systematic abuse” inside routine commerce structurally different from compliance error or ordinary trade-policy disagreement?
Part II: Scope and Impact
The Section 301 China tariffs give us the clearest available test of tariff evasion because the basic math is straightforward. The China 301 tariffs applied to one country, covered four defined lists of goods, and used consistent published tariff rates. That allowed EnforcementNOW to estimate what CBP should have collected if the original tariffed trade base had continued to enter honestly — and then compare that estimate to what CBP actually collected.
The policy was supposed to do two things: collect significant revenue and level the playing field. It did neither at the scale intended.
What doesn’t explain the gap
The exact dollar value of evasion cannot be measured precisely. But the gap between the $70 billion annual benchmark and actual collections still has to be explained. The main lawful explanations do not account for it.
Did Americans stop importing these goods? No. U.S. global imports of the listed goods grew 34% between 2017 and 2025.
Did production leave China en masse? No. Some production moved, but not at the scale required to replace hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffed imports across thousands of product categories in just a few years. Industrial supply chains do not move that fast, especially where qualified capacity, tooling, labor, certification, and cost structure all have to be rebuilt. Nor did Chinese production disappear. Manufacturing in China remained stable after the tariffs were imposed, and in some categories increased.
Did imports come in under the de minimis exemption? Partially, but it’s complicated. The $800 duty-free channel was exploited. Shipments rose from roughly 134 million in 2015 to 1.36 billion in 2024 — a tenfold increase. The flaw was structural: the rule capped declared value at $800, not weight, quantity, or aggregate import volume. That made it possible to move large volumes of Chinese goods through a channel never designed for mass commercial trade. It was an abused loophole that has since been closed.
That leaves the harder explanation: the goods kept moving between China and the United States, but the trade records stopped reflecting reality. The gap is explained by the methods bad actors use to make customs paperwork lie: false origin, false value, false classification, and unlawful entry.
Evidence by Evasion Mechanism
Transhipment. Seven years after the Section 301 tariffs were imposed, the trade map had changed dramatically. For example, as of 2024 China was exporting more than $150 billion more per year to Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia than before the tariffs were implemented in 2018. Those same three countries were then exporting nearly the same additional amount per year to the United States, often in similar product categories and on the same timeline.
The point is not that production neatly moved out of China. The point is that Chinese goods appear to have changed route. China shipped more to Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia shipped more to the United States. The scale, timing, and product overlap all point in the same direction: industrial-scale illegal transshipment.
Undervaluation. When goods move from China to the United States, both governments record the transaction: China records the export, and the United States records the import. For years, the relationship was stable: U.S. import records showed about $70 billion more than China’s export records. After the Section 301 tariffs went into effect, that relationship flipped. By 2024, U.S. import records showed about $85 billion less than China’s export records — a swing of roughly $155 billion.
In plain English: China said a certain value of goods were shipped, but U.S. import records showed far less value arriving. Federal Reserve Bank of New York research identified more than $100 billion in “missing imports,” attributable to China. That is what undervaluation looks like: goods enter the country, but at artificially reduced declared values, lowering the duties paid.
Misclassification. More difficult to detect in aggregate data. However, it reveals itself through major enforcement cases. The two largest trade fraud cases in U.S. history were both rooted in misclassification. In the China Zhongwang/Perfectus aluminum case, the criminal restitution order was $1.83 billion; the related civil False Claims Act settlement later resolved for $549.5 million. In the Ford Transit Connect case, the government’s claim had been valued at roughly $1.3 billion before Ford settled for $365 million in 2024. These cases show why misclassification is an effective strategy: changing the product category can mitigate hundreds of millions — or even billions — of dollars in tariff liability while leaving little obvious signal in headline trade data.
Smuggling. The hardest form to measure because it is designed to defeat the customs record itself. In a 2025 Los Angeles case, the DOJ charged nine defendants in a 15-count indictment involving counterfeit and illegal goods shipped from China through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The alleged scheme used logistics companies, warehouses, and truck drivers to remove contraband from containers selected for inspection, replace it with filler cargo, and reseal the containers with counterfeit customs seals. Investigators seized more than $130 million in contraband and alleged the organization was responsible for at least $200 million in smuggled goods.
Bottom line: The precise dollar value of trade fraud is unknowable. The scale is not.
Study Questions
Why does Section 301 offer a cleaner way to appreciate the potential scale of tariff fraud?
Successful trade crime often corrupts the data used to measure it. Economic studies are essential for identifying scale and patterns, but they are not enough. Enforcement cases show how the fraud works; stories from industry shows where the harm is occurring in real time. How should policymakers use all three forms of evidence to understand a problem that aggregate trade data may never fully reveal?
Part III: How We Got Here
The United States once had a customs system built around verification: what entered the country, where it came from, and what it was worth. It was not destroyed all at once. It was undone piece by piece over fifty years, each cut defended as modernization, simplification, or alignment with global trading norms. The result was a long, slow unraveling of customs verification — dressed up as progress.
What the timeline shows
Verification was surrendered. In 1979, the Trade Agreements Act ended the American Selling Price system and made transaction value the foundation of customs valuation — shifting the system toward importer-declared prices. In 1982, Congress ended consular invoice verification abroad. In 1992, the Federal Circuit’s First Sale Rule allowed qualifying importers to use an earlier sale in a multi-tier supply chain as the dutiable value. In 1993, the Customs Modernization Act completed the inversion: the importer became the first-line assessor of his own duties, with Customs auditing after the fact.
Then came the volume shock. By the time China’s PNTR and WTO accession arrived in 2000–2001, the architecture of customs verification had already been weakened. The fivefold surge in Chinese imports that followed did not cause the failure — it revealed it. China walked through doors whose hinges we had already removed. For a generation, U.S. policy and business leaders assumed integration would moderate Beijing. Beijing accepted the access, rejected the premise, and used the opening to advance its own national interest.
Then Customs’ mission changed. In 2003, the agency was moved from Treasury — its institutional home since 1789 — into the new Department of Homeland Security, where customs enforcement became part of a broader homeland-security mandate rather than a revenue-centered one.
When Section 232 and Section 301 tariffs restored meaningful duties on large categories of imports in 2018, the reward for cheating multiplied overnight. But the enforcement architecture needed to meet that risk had never been rebuilt.
The reform agenda in Part VI is not an attempt to invent something new. It is an attempt to rebuild what was lost.
Book by Clyde Prestowitz (Yale University Press, 2021)
Author Clyde Prestowitz’s subsequent career has been one long argument that the post-1979 trade settlement was a strategic miscalculation — hollowing out the verification infrastructure of American commerce while assuming that other states would reciprocate openness in kind.
Why Read Prestowitz writes with the authority of a practitioner who watched the dismantling happen from the inside. He is not a polemicist; he is a former government official who concluded, slowly and reluctantly, that the consensus he had worked under was incorrect.
Study Questions
The text calls the unraveling “a long, slow weakening of verification, dressed up as progress.” For each reform, what did policymakers claim they were gaining — and what verification capacity did the country actually surrender?
If policymakers were right to want a faster, more modern customs system, what did they fail to build in its place? What would a modern verification system need to include to preserve speed without making enforcement depend on trust?
Part IV: Enforcement
Straight forward administrative customs cases can be handled entirely by CBP. But if a matter involves AD/CVD evasion, suspected fraud, unpaid penalties, or litigation, the case becomes a relay across agencies. CBP may start the process, but Commerce, ITC, HSI, DOJ, Treasury, and multiple courts may each control part of the outcome.
CBP’s entry reviews, post-summary work, and audits recover substantial duty revenue each year. That is the routine compliance machinery, and it matters.
Deliberate evasion runs on a harder track. CBP can issue penalties, EAPA can identify AD/CVD evasion, and DOJ can pursue civil or criminal cases. But this pathway rarely produces timely, visible consequences. Public data on penalties actually collected is limited, formal DOJ actions are rare, and cases that reach charging often take years to resolve.
The result is a system that works reasonably well when importers make mistakes and cooperate, but becomes slow and fragmented when the importer refuses to cooperate or the facts suggest fraud. Two questions reveal the problem: how likely is detection, and how certain are consequences if fraud is detected? For deliberate fraud, the system struggles on both. Detection is unlikely, and consequences, when they come, often arrive years after the market injury has occurred. EnforcementNOW’s trade-fraud case tracker indicates that the average time from first violation to case closure is 8.4 years.
That 8.4-year average breaks into two windows. EnforcementNOW’s review of DOJ-closed cases over the last three years found the underlying fraud ran an average of 5.6 years before it stopped — years in which duties went unpaid and lawful competitors lost share. The remaining 2.8 years were enforcement lag: investigation, referral, litigation, and settlement after the conduct had already ended.
The following two cases show how the system breaks in practice: one where the target sits offshore and disappears, and one where the target is visible, but the government still moves too slowly to stop the harm.
Case Study: Charlotte Pipe and Foundry
Charlotte Pipe and Foundry. North Carolina. 1,800 employees, seven U.S. plants. Founded 1901.
In 2017–18, Charlotte Pipe and the Cast Iron Soil Pipe Institute won AD/CVD orders against Chinese cast iron pipe and fittings — duties reaching 345% on pipe and 494% on fittings. Chinese producers immediately switched to transshipping through Malaysia and Cambodia. Because EAPA does not allow CBP to initiate investigations on its own, Charlotte Pipe filed all ten transshipment allegations itself over the next seven years. When investigators went to the alleged Malaysian and Cambodian foundries, they found, in Muller’s words, “an empty warehouse and a bus stop, but no foundries.” Each enforcement action triggered the dissolution of one shell company and the appearance of another.
Estimated duties evaded in this example exceed $44 million. Chinese transshippers now openly advertise the service.
In July 2025, Charlotte Pipe’s VP Bradford Muller testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee in support of the Fighting Trade Cheats Act and a $20 million DOJ trade-fraud crime unit.
“We have availed ourselves of every legal remedy at our disposal, to no avail. The illegal trade flows continue.” – Bradford Muller, VP Charlotte Pipe
Case Study: Plews & Edelmann
Plews & Edelmann. Dixon, Illinois. 117 years old. Automotive aftermarket manufacturer.
In 2018, Section 301 tariffs imposed a 25% duty on Chinese auto parts. Plews expected its Chinese competitor, Qingdao Sunsong, to raise prices. Sunsong didn’t — it shifted the declared origin of its power steering hoses from China to Thailand. Its supply base and equipment hadn’t moved, and Sunsong’s own filings said it accelerated Thai processing to reduce tariff costs. Independent analysis later found that Thai processing added only 4% to 8% of value add per part — far below the threshold required to qualify as “substantial transformation”, a necessary precondition to qualify for a change of country of origin.
Beginning in 2021, Plews pursued every available channel: a False Claims Act filing, a CBP e-allegation, engagement with DOJ’s trade-fraud apparatus, and congressional outreach. In 2023, members of the House Select Committee on the CCP reviewed the matter and wrote to DHS describing Sunsong’s conduct as “a case of blatant trade fraud” with “a catastrophic impact on American manufacturers.” By then, Plews had sold off a division and laid off roughly 50 workers — about a quarter of its U.S. workforce.
A DHS raid on Sunsong’s Ohio facility followed in January 2024, and a DOJ investigation remains ongoing as of May 2026. Sunsong continues to operate in Ohio undeterred.
“Justice delayed is justice denied — not only for Plews, but for American jobs and the rule of law.” — David Rashid, Executive Chairman
In both cases, these American companies did what the system asked. In both cases, the illegal trade flows continued. The problem is not the absence of reporting tools. It is the absence of timely consequences. Companies identify the fraud, report the fraud, and still watch the damage continue.
The reporting tools and their limits
| Tool | Who can file | Real-world limitation |
| e-Allegations Program | Anyone | No transparency. OIG audits document failures. No measurable outcomes reported. |
| EAPA (Enforce and Protect Act) | Domestic industry | Can disrupt one evasion channel, but offshore NRIs/IORs can dissolve and reappear. Public reporting identifies evasion and duties at issue, not dollars actually collected. |
| False Claims Act (qui tam) | Private relators | Cases take years. Assistant U.S. Attorney offices lack capacity. Charges often knocked down to a “speeding ticket.” |
| DOJ Criminal Whistleblower | Whistleblowers | Too new to assess. Faces the same resource constraints and limitations as the rest of the system. |
These tools were supposed to turn industry intelligence into enforcement action. But when tips disappear into opaque processes, targets operate offshore, cases take years, and investigators and prosecutors lack capacity, tariff policy is hollowed out in practice. Detection remains uncertain; consequences arrive slowly, inconsistently, or not at all.
Study Questions
The reporting tools differ in design, but they fail in the same way against offshore Non-Resident Importers. What is the common failure point?
Charlotte Pipe and Plews expose two different weaknesses in the same enforcement chain: offshore targets that disappear before accountability can attach, and visible targets that continue operating while cases move too slowly to matter. What does this contrast teach policymakers about the difference between detecting trade crime and actually deterring it?
Part V: China
The trade-enforcement problem is not exclusive to China. However, China is the critical stress test for our weakened system. Its scale, state-directed industrial model, and ability to weaponize customs evasion turn enforcement gaps into national strategic vulnerabilities.
Case Study: Solar Panel Industry
Solar is the clearest example. In 2004, Chinese firms produced less than 2% of the world’s solar cells. By 2024, China dominated every major stage of the solar supply chain—polysilicon, wafers, cells, and modules. This was not simply a case of private firms succeeding in a neutral market. It reflected a state-directed industrial strategy built on subsidies, cheap credit, industrial coordination, forced scale, and long-term policy support. The CCP’s Made in China 2025 program later made that ambition explicit.
That distinction matters because enforcement tools built for ordinary trade disputes are not designed for state-directed industrial systems that can reorganize production, absorb losses, and reroute supply chains faster than cases can be completed. The concern is not genuine industrial relocation, but origin engineering — networks built to preserve Chinese supply, capital, and control while creating a claim of non-China origin that the underlying economic reality does not support.
After the United States imposed AD/CVD duties on Chinese solar cells in 2012, Chinese producers and their supply-chain networks adapted faster than enforcement. Rather than lose access to the U.S. market, production and assembly shifted through Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam while continuing to rely heavily on Chinese inputs. Commerce ultimately found circumvention in 2023, but enforcement operated on a different timeline than the supply chains it sought to police.
The consequences were significant. First Solar warned that relentless Chinese subsidization and dumping had collapsed prices and created major imported oversupply. Qcells, despite investing heavily in U.S. manufacturing, joined other producers in seeking action against China-linked firms operating through Southeast Asia. The issue is not simply unpaid duties. It is distorted prices, stranded investment, lost industrial capacity, and domestic producers competing against a state-backed production system.
Solar shows the stakes: weak verification can cost revenue in any trade relationship. Against China’s scale and industrial strategy, it can cost an industry.
Book by Bethany Allen
Why read? Allen makes visible the operating system that produces the evasion patterns described in Parts II and IV. The transshipping networks, the shell companies, the offshore importers of record with no U.S. nexus — these are features of a state-shaped trade ecosystem in which opacity, leverage, and offshore structures can serve national industrial objectives.
Study Questions
The China Shock shows that harm from non-market competition can become permanent before the law responds, if it ever does. Given that due process is necessary, what must change operationally — staffing, triage, interagency ownership, interim tools, or public accountability — so enforcement can matter before the damage becomes irreversible?
Why is “non-market economy” the analytically useful description of China — rather than “adversary” or “competitor”?
Part VI: What to Fix
Reform means rebuilding what decades unraveled: a verification system weakened over fifty years and an enforcement architecture never designed for modern trade fraud. No single bill closes that gap. Reform must advance on several fronts at once.
De minimis shows both the possibility and the limits. The $800 duty-free channel fueled a decade of Chinese platform growth at the expense of U.S. importers, manufacturers, and logistics providers. Closing it — suspended by executive action in 2025, with permanent statutory repeal enacted in 2025 and effective July 1, 2027 — required executive action, congressional action, and political will. But the malign actors did not leave. Stripped of that cover and now facing Section 301 and Section 232 tariffs, they have more reason to falsify paperwork — shifting volume into transshipment, undervaluation, misclassification, and smuggling unless enforcement shifts with it.
The Executive Order to Strengthen Customs Enforcement, signed by President Trump on June 3, 2026, treats customs fraud as a national-level risk, not merely a revenue issue. The EO starts the work; implementation and legislation make it durable. That agenda moves across four pillars.
Four categories of reform
Coordination and accountability. The problem is not a lack of tools; it is the absence of a clear mandate, coordinating authority, resources, and outcome measurement. CBP audits and assesses, HSI investigates, and DOJ prosecutes — but escalation has been inconsistent, capacity thin, and results opaque. The EO begins to supply what the system has lacked: a DHS-led mandate to tighten customs enforcement, an express directive for the Attorney General to prioritize serious import-fraud cases, annual transparency reports, and recommendations to strengthen the regime. OMB involvement and White House coordination give that mandate force. This front does not require a new statute to begin; it requires sustained executive direction, adequate resources, and measured outcomes.
Close loopholes. The goal is to close legal and procedural pathways that malign actors can exploit. One is paper-thin importer accountability. A foreign actor with no U.S. presence can serve as importer of record; when CBP catches the fraud, the shell entity can dissolve and another can appear. The EO moves here first, directing DHS and CBP to use existing authority to tighten importer eligibility, require stronger bonding and domestic accountability, establish good-standing criteria, and restrict informal entry by foreign importers. The SAFE Act would make much of this permanent law. Other pathways remain, including valuation rules that can be abused to understate the value of goods entering U.S. commerce. The Last Sale Valuation Act would address that gap.
Strengthen enforcement. The principle is deterrence: a penalty too small and too late becomes a cost of doing business. The EO supplies immediate teeth through a 50 percent minimum penalty floor and prioritized enforcement of forced-labor, misclassification, undervaluation, transshipment, and smuggling laws already on the books. Legislation adds capacity and capability. The PAIL Act would create a dedicated DOJ trade-crime unit — the Eliot Ness model: experts focused on one mission, not prosecutors borrowed episodically. Other bills would let injured industries pursue malign actors directly through stronger penalties, a private right of action, faster AD/CVD-evasion responses, and authority to destroy dangerous refused imports. The aim is enforcement with the reach, expertise, and speed to match modern trade fraud.
Enhance market transparency. The principle is visibility: enforcement depends on knowing who is importing, where goods come from, and how they entered. Public manifests exist for ocean freight but not air, truck, or rail — a holdover from the 1930 Customs Act. The Customs Modernization Act would extend manifest transparency beyond ocean freight.
Country-of-origin transparency is the parallel principle within market visibility. Consumers, competitors, and enforcement agencies should be able to see where products are actually made, whether sold online, at retail, or in sensitive sectors like agriculture and pharmaceuticals. Current proposed origin-disclosure legislative proposals would address e-commerce, retail, beef, shrimp, and drug products.
A continuously updated list of legislation supporting each category is maintained at enforcementnow.com/petition-for-change.
Book by Robert Lighthizer
Lighthizer was USTR under the first Trump administration and the architect of the 2018 Section 301 tariffs. No Trade Is Free is part memoir, part indictment of the post-WWII free-trade consensus, and part operating manual for the reform agenda this guide describes.
Why ReadLighthizer makes the case that tariffs without enforcement are policy theater — exactly the argument this guide is built on. His chapters on AD/CVD evasion, transshipment, and the structural weaknesses of the WTO valuation system map directly onto the reforms in this Part.
Study Questions
How does each of the four reform categories address low certainty, slow speed of consequences, or both?
Which of the four reform categories is hardest to advance — and why?
If stronger trade enforcement serves the public interest, why is reform so difficult to enact? Who has the most to lose when cost and risk are shifted back onto the firms that import, distribute, finance, and profit from offshore production — and what does that reveal about the real obstacle to rebuilding a rules-based trading system?
Closing
The American kitchen cabinet industry employs 250,000 people. It produces roughly $14 billion in gross output annually. Ninety-five percent of its companies are family-owned. Forty percent of its workforce lives in rural communities and underserved blue-collar towns — in Alabama, Indiana, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, South Dakota, and Georgia.
In March 2019, 50 of these companies filed antidumping and countervailing duty petitions against wooden cabinet imports from China, which had captured $1.7 billion of the U.S. market. In April 2020, the Department of Commerce imposed AD/CVD duties averaging 59 percent. The industry had won.
The relief lasted months. By late 2020, the same cabinets were moving through Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines. The Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association filed allegation after allegation. CBP found, repeatedly, that Chinese cabinets were being relabeled in third countries and shipped to U.S. ports. The transshipment continued. By 2024, Southeast Asia and Mexico accounted for two-thirds of cabinet imports, and the cabinet trade deficit had doubled from where it stood before the duties.
The legal victories did not stop the bleeding. The plants kept closing. MasterBrand in Alabama: 750 workers across two waves. Solid Wood in Pennsylvania, 2020. Tru Cabinetry in Alabama, 2022. The Cabinetworks Group, two plants in 2024 — hundreds of jobs in Pennsylvania, 350 in Texas. Dura Supreme in North Carolina, all 74 employees in January 2025. UltraCraft in North Carolina, 200 jobs in September 2025. American Woodmark in Virginia, 131 jobs. Each closing was more than a facility. It was a payroll, a supplier base, a lunch counter, a school fundraiser, a mortgage payment, a family’s plan. Each plant anchored a community. Together, they were a national story. Most of the country never heard about it.
This is what enforcement failure looks like when you watch it for six years. The industry did everything the system asked. It organized. It filed petitions. It won the legal victory. And it kept losing — not in court, but at the border, where legal victory never became real protection.
Cabinetry is only one chapter. The same story is being told by wire hanger manufacturers in Alabama, cast iron pipe foundries in North Carolina, aluminum extruders in Texas, rolled copper producers in New York, auto parts assemblers in Illinois, and Gulf shrimp producers on the Louisiana coast. Different products. Different regions. Same pattern.
These are not abstract policy constituencies. They are the parts of the American economy that furnish homes, build infrastructure, assemble vehicles, and feed the nation. The system was not defeated overnight. It was unraveled by American choices, over decades and in plain sight. It can be rebuilt, but not on the old timetable.
Our commitment to rebuild American industry requires that trade enforcement no longer be treated as a secondary function. The Executive Branch, Congress, and agency leadership must make it a national mandate in practice, with the authority, resources, urgency, and transparent measures of progress required to carry it out.
American industry is not asking for protection from competition. It is asking for the laws of the United States to be enforced.
