CBP says its manufacturer code does not always identify the party it wants

Federal Register document 2026-17926 - the number carried in the govinfo URL of the copy captured for this piece - is a list of questions, not a rule. In it, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says it is weighing changes to its regulations that would give it a better view of the supply chains behind imported goods, and it puts three subjects to the public: foreign export documentation for imported goods; the parties involved in the manufacture, production, movement and exportation of those goods; and innovative technical approaches for supply chain tracing. The govinfo URL of the copy captured for this piece places it in the Federal Register of September 2, 2026, and it closes with a signature block reading Susan S. Thomas, Executive Assistant Commissioner, Office of Trade, U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

A client alert from the law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius calls the filing an advance notice of proposed rulemaking and warns that it "could materially expand the information importers of record must obtain, maintain, and potentially provide to the US government". The captured text of the notice does not apply that label to itself. Both the label and the September 2 date come from the record around the document rather than from a line inside it, and this piece says so rather than pretending otherwise.

The sentence that matters to anyone who sources garments sits in the notice's discussion of the identifier it calls the MID; the captured text never expands the acronym. The MID, the notice explains, is built from the name and address of the manufacturer or shipper as those appear on the commercial invoice, coded to instructions CBP specifies. Then the agency writes that although use of the code is longstanding, it "provides limited identifying information and does not always identify the actual party that may be of interest to CBP for enforcement purposes and is not always available to CBP early enough in the entry process to be useful."

Read the clause structure. The first limitation is flat and unhedged: limited identifying information. The two that follow are qualified with "not always", which is some distance from conceding routine failure. What the sentence does concede is that the identifier the entry process has leaned on for years can point past the party CBP is looking for, and can arrive after the point where it would have mattered. The Morgan Lewis alert reads the same passage as CBP treating the existing MID as potentially insufficient on three counts: whether it uniquely identifies anyone, whether it identifies the party the agency actually wants to investigate, and whether it lands early enough.

That admission arrives on top of a demand the textile and apparel trade made months earlier. In June 2026, Textile World published a statement welcoming a letter led by two members of Congress and signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers, a letter the statement describes as calling for urgent action against illegal trade practices hitting the U.S. textile and apparel industry. The statement reads: "This letter sends a powerful message that customs fraud, illegal transshipment, and tariff evasion are rampant and must be stopped. These illegal trade practices cost American jobs, undermine legitimate manufacturers, weaken our trade agreements, and deprive the U.S. Treasury of billions of dollars in revenue."

The page captured for this piece carries those words with no speaker attached to them. The research file identifies the speaker as Kim Glas, president and chief executive of the National Council of Textile Organizations; the captured page does not carry that identification, so the words are attributed here to the statement Textile World published. "Rampant" is that statement's characterization. The allegations of fraud, transshipment and evasion are its assertions about unnamed foreign actors, and no court or police record sits in this evidence base to test them.

Textile World's May 2026 state-of-the-industry feature set the same frame in shorter sentences. "Customs fraud continued." "Illegal transshipments surged." The feature estimates that half of the shipments it discusses were textiles and apparel, and ties many of them to forced labor, counterfeit goods and fentanyl trafficking. The excerpt captured for this piece does not carry the shipment total that estimate refers to, and the captured text gives no source for the estimate: it is the trade press reporting the trade's own account, not CBP data. The same feature lists the industry's asks - rules-of-origin enforcement under free trade agreements, heavier penalties for customs fraud, the UFLPA enforced in full, and an enforcement strategy written for textiles specifically.

Roughly three months separate the demand from the response, and the response is a set of questions. The notice gives the public until December 1, 2026 to comment, and Morgan Lewis describes it as seeking public input on "a range of potential requirements"; that the filing imposes none is this piece's own reading of the captured text. Nothing in the captured text obliges an importer to produce a foreign export document, name an upstream mill or adopt a tracing technology as of the September 5 capture.

The captured text is silent in other places too. It contains no textile- or apparel-specific provision, no cost estimate for the disclosures it floats, and no figure for the volume of imports that would be affected.

The chain of authority is short and dated. On June 3, 2026, the notice records, the President signed Executive Order 14411, Strengthening Customs Enforcement. The order's text states that "Customs reform is long overdue" and directs that "The Secretary shall take steps to establish heightened import disclosure and certification requirements consistent with the policy of this order." Section 3 of that order, the notice states, directs the establishment of heightened import disclosure requirements. The order also frames enforcement as the thing that keeps importers of record correctly identified and accountable for duties owed, and that secures compliance with the laws governing forced labor, rules of origin and origin marking - on this piece's reading, the body of law a cut-and-sew supply chain runs through.

As analysis, and drawn from the two documents rather than found in either: the regulator and the regulated are describing the same blind spot from opposite sides. CBP says its identifier does not always reach the party it wants. A write-up published by Oritain reports heavy investment in traceability infrastructure while "the gap between what brands claim and what they can actually verify is widening, not closing", and that "Certifications record what suppliers declare, but they do not physically verify whether those declarations are accurate". The captured page attaches no speaker to either line. If both accounts hold, the tier a heightened disclosure rule would target - the mill, the spinner, the intermediary shipper - is the tier neither the agency nor the brand can currently see, which is a difficult place from which to draft a certification requirement.

What a reader can check is dated. The notice is Federal Register document 2026-17926 and its comment window closes on December 1, 2026; anything CBP proposes about foreign export documents, upstream party identification or tracing technology passes through what comes back to it. This desk's falsifiable call: CBP will not publish a notice of proposed rulemaking following Federal Register document 2026-17926 on or before December 1, 2026 - the notice itself sets that day as its comment deadline and describes the agency as considering amendments rather than proposing them. If a proposed rule following that notice appears in the Federal Register before then, the call is wrong.