Your freight is held for examination at Miami International. What now?

Not every hold is the same thing

The broadest and quickest is a scan. CBP runs non intrusive inspection equipment, the imaging systems often called VACIS, and looks at your freight without opening it. Many shipments that get flagged never go further than this.

An intensive examination is the one people mean when they say their container was pulled. The freight is moved to a facility, opened and physically examined, and that takes handling, labor and a place to do it.

A third kind is not a customs examination at all. Another federal agency, FDA or USDA most often at Miami, can hold your goods on its own authority for its own reasons. Your customs entry can be entirely in order while that hold sits, and clearing it means satisfying that agency, not CBP.

Knowing which of the three you have is the first real information, because the three have nothing in common except the word hold.

What a Centralized Examination Station is

An intensive exam has to happen somewhere. A Centralized Examination Station is a private facility, operated under agreement with CBP under 19 CFR part 118, where merchandise is brought to be examined.

It is worth knowing that these are private businesses, selected by CBP for a fixed term. In September 2025 CBP opened an application period for the Centralized Examination Station serving Miami International Airport, a sixty day window, for a five year agreement that cannot be extended. That is the ordinary machinery of the system rather than a sign of trouble, but it explains something importers find strange: the place your freight goes is not a government warehouse, and its costs are commercial costs.

Which is the part that stings. The exam is CBP's decision and the bill is yours. Moving the freight, storing it, opening it and putting it back are charged to the importer, whatever the examination finds.

Why we will not quote you a number of days

Every importer asks and we understand why. But CBP does not publish average examination times, and we have looked. A broker who gives you a confident figure is either passing on a rumor or telling you what you want to hear, and on a perishable shipment that guess can cost you the cargo.

What we can tell you honestly is what governs the length. How many shipments are queued at the station that week. Whether a second agency is also holding it. Whether the paperwork answers the question the examiner is asking, or raises another one. That last part is the only one anybody can influence after the fact.

What actually shortens it

Documents that agree with each other. The commercial invoice matching the packing list, a description specific enough to identify the goods, an origin the documents support. An examiner who can reconcile the paperwork in one pass does not need a second.

Answering quickly and completely. When a request for information arrives, a same day answer with the actual documents beats a fast promise of them.

And being reachable. Holds have a way of surfacing late in the day, and a shipment nobody is watching waits until somebody notices.

What will not help is calling the port and asking them to hurry. It is worth saying plainly because people try, and it does not work.