A licensed customs broker for Florida importers

Florida is not one port, it is fourteen

Florida has more deepwater seaports than any state in the country, and they do not do the same work. Port Everglades and PortMiami move containerized consumer goods, apparel, building materials and food, much of it Latin American. Port Tampa Bay moves bulk, fertilizer, fuel and a growing container business. JAXPORT in Jacksonville is vehicles and containers, and the largest vehicle-handling port in the state. Port Canaveral runs cruise, bulk and a container terminal that Central Florida importers increasingly use because it is an hour from the distribution corridor.

Add Port of Palm Beach, Port Manatee and the air cargo at Miami International, Orlando International, Tampa and Jacksonville, and the honest summary is that Florida is a network rather than a place. Which of those gateways your freight should use is a question worth asking before the booking, not after, and it is one we will answer straight even when the answer is a port we do not usually see you at.

We are a Florida corporation, with an Orlando office

Julio Rodriguez US Customs Broker Corporation is registered with the Florida Division of Corporations as a foreign profit corporation, document F21000003563, filed in June 2021 and active. Our Orlando office is at 524 Mid Florida Dr, Suite 201, a real address with real staff, and we serve Miami daily, with an office there in the plans.

We say that plainly because the alternative is common in this trade and worth naming: a broker lists a suite in every metropolitan area, none of them staffed, so that the map results look like a national footprint. Your entry does not care where the desk is. It cares whose license is on it, whether the filing went out today, and whether someone picks up when the terminal calls.

How a Florida entry is actually filed

Customs stopped being a counter a long time ago. An entry is transmitted in ACE, the Automated Commercial Environment, and CBP's systems process it the same way whether the broker is across the street from the terminal or across the state. We hold our own ACE connection rather than renting somebody else's, which is the difference between us fixing a rejected transmission ourselves and us waiting on a third party to fix it.

In practice that means we file ahead of arrival wherever the documents allow it, so that release is waiting on CBP rather than on us. On a Port Everglades container with a tight last free day, the hours saved by filing before the vessel berths are the hours that decide whether you pay demurrage.

Perishables, produce and the agencies behind them

Florida imports food at a scale that changes how a broker has to work. Flowers, fresh produce, seafood and pharmaceuticals arrive by air at Miami International and by sea at Everglades and Miami, and almost all of it carries a partner government agency review on top of the customs entry: FDA prior notice, USDA and APHIS on plant and animal material, and occasionally Fish and Wildlife.

Those reviews are where perishable freight is actually lost, because a slow answer costs product rather than money. We file the agency data with the entry rather than after it, and when an agency comes back with a question we answer it the same day.

The Latin America trade, in the language it is written in

Florida is the United States' gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, and a large share of the importers moving that freight negotiate, invoice and keep their records in Spanish. Far too often they then have to explain all of it to a broker in English, and the errors that creep in during that translation are the errors that end up on an entry summary.

Our whole team works in both languages. You can send us a commercial invoice in Spanish and talk it through in Spanish, and the entry still goes to CBP in correct English. That is not a courtesy, it is error prevention.

Puerto Rico, which most Florida brokers hand off

A great many Florida importers also move freight to and from Puerto Rico, and discover that it is neither a foreign shipment nor a simple domestic one. Puerto Rico sits inside the United States customs territory, so there is no duty on goods moving from the mainland, and it has its own excise tax regime and its own filing system in SURI that has nothing to do with CBP.

This is the part most mainland brokers subcontract. Our main office is in Cataño, minutes from the Port of San Juan, and we have been filing there since 2007, so for us it is not a referral, it is the same file.

Which Florida market are you in?

We publish a page for each of the Florida markets we work most, with the ports, the cargo and the specifics that matter in each: Miami for PortMiami and MIA air cargo, Doral for the freight-forwarding district around the airport, Hialeah for the warehouse and distribution belt, and Orlando for Port Canaveral, Orlando International and the Central Florida corridor.

Import duty refunds for Florida importers

Whichever Florida port your freight came through, the refund routes are national: IEEPA refunds through CBP's CAPE process, post-summary corrections before liquidation, protests after it, and duty drawback, up to 99 percent of the duties paid, on goods that are exported. Section 301 duties qualify for drawback too. Our free refund checker sorts your entries by route, and we file them from Orlando under filer code EWV.