Customs clearance at Miami International Airport

Air is a different clock, not just a faster boat

Ocean freight gives you days between departure and arrival. Air can give you hours. A shipment can leave Bogota in the evening and be on the ground at MIA before the office opens, which means the entry has to be ready before the aircraft moves, not after it lands.

In practice that changes what we need from you and when. Send the airway bill and the commercial invoice at booking. If we are waiting on documents while the freight is already on a ramp, the airline's storage clock is running and it runs faster than a terminal's.

Perishables, pharmaceuticals and the agencies that own them

A large share of what arrives at MIA is flowers, fresh produce, seafood and pharmaceuticals, and those are governed by agencies other than CBP. FDA prior notice, USDA and APHIS requirements, and in some cases a hold placed by an agency that has nothing to do with customs at all.

We file the partner agency paperwork with the entry rather than after it. On a perishable air shipment that ordering is the whole game: a consignment released by CBP and held by FDA is still a consignment sitting in a cooler at your expense.

5206 and 5201 are not interchangeable

Both sit in CBP district 52 and both are in Miami, which is exactly why people conflate them. They are separate ports of entry with separate codes, and your entry names one of them. If your company imports by both air and ocean into Miami, you are filing under two port codes, and your records should reflect that.