Port workers in rare spotlight as tariffs roil trade

Customs brokers find some recognition after navigating a year of turbulent U.S. policy.

- BY MATT SEDENSKY

After half a century immersed in the world of trade, Amy Magnus thought she had seen it all as a customs broker, navigating mountains of regulations and logistical hurdles to import everything, including lumber, bananas, circus animals and Egyptian mummies.

Then came 2025.

Tariffs were imposed in ways she’d never seen. New rules left her wondering what they really meant. Federal workers, always a reliable backstop, grew more elusive.

“Twenty twenty-five has changed the trade system,” Magnus says. “It wasn’t perfect before, but it was a functioning system. Now, it is a lot more chaotic and troubling.”

Once cogs in the international trade machine, customs brokers are getting a rare spotlight as President Trump reinvents America’s commercial ties with the world. If this breathless year of tariffs amounts to a trade war, customs brokers are its front lines.

Few Americans have been exposed as exhaustively to every fluctuation of trade policy as the customs broker. They were there in the opening days of Trump's second term, when tariffs were announced on Canada and Mexico, and two days later, when those same levies were paused. They were there through every rule on imports of steel and seafood, on cars and copper, on polysilicon and pharmaceuticals, and on and on.

For every tariff, for every carve-out, for every order, brokers have been left to translate policy into reality, line by line and code by code, in a year when it seemed every week brought change.

“We were used to decades of a certain way of processing, and from January to now, that universe has been turned kind of upside-down on us,” says Al Raffa, a customs broker in Elizabeth, N.J., who helps shepherd container loads of cargo into the U.S. packed to the brim with rounds of brie, boxes of chocolate and other goods.