A customs house, and nothing else

What this company is

DAPE Solutions Incorporated is a customs brokerage licensed by US Customs and Border Protection, filing entries since 2016 from an office in Linden, New Jersey. Being minutes from the Elizabeth and Newark marine terminals is useful, but it is not the reason we can clear your cargo. CBP retired the old district permit system in favour of a single national permit, so a licensed broker files at any port in the country from wherever it happens to sit. Your container can land at Long Beach, Savannah, Houston or Laredo. The entry goes in from here either way.

The commodity range is deliberately unrestricted: food under FDA, protein under FSIS, chemicals under TSCA, steel and aluminium with their Section 232 content reporting, vehicles with their EPA and DOT paperwork, furniture, machinery, jewellery, household effects. Ocean, air, truck and rail. If it is arriving and it needs an entry, it is in scope.

No freight desk

We are not a freight forwarder, an NVOCC or a third-party logistics provider, and we are not quietly one of those with a brokerage bolted on. The distinction is about incentives. Inside a forwarder, the entry is the small line on the invoice that protects the large one, and the customs department exists to defend a freight booking. Here the entry is the product. Nobody in this office earns anything on where your containers get routed, so when we say a shipment should move in bond to an inland port, or should not, there is no freight margin sitting behind the advice.

In practice that means we work alongside whoever is moving your cargo. If your forwarder is doing a good job, keep them. We take the documents, file the entry, and send the release back to everyone who needs it.

Small, deliberately

This is a small firm and it is meant to stay small. The same people carry a file from the power of attorney through to liquidation, so nobody has to be told twice what you import or which of your suppliers keeps describing the same part three different ways. There is no front line reading from a script before escalating to somebody who can actually read a 7501.

What you get from that is direct access to the person who filed your entry. What we get is a ceiling on how much work we can take, which we would rather admit than quietly absorb.

What that looks like on a file

• ISF goes out the day the documents reach us, not the day before lading.
• Ocean entries are filed days ahead of the vessel, so release is waiting at discharge instead of starting after it.
• On high line-count or high-duty entries we send a draft 7501 well before arrival. Finding a wrong unit price on a draft costs an email. Finding it after transmission costs a post summary correction.
• If CBP holds the shipment you hear it from us, and you hear which kind of hold it is. A document request, an exam at a centralised examination station, a partner agency review and an AD/CVD question all need different answers, and the first hour matters.
• After release the file stays open. Post summary corrections, protests, prior disclosures and drawback claims are part of the work, not a separate engagement.

A 2026 entry is rarely one rate

The tariff line that used to carry a single duty rate now routinely carries several. Section 232 reaches derivative steel and aluminium articles and is assessed on metal content, reported by the country where the metal was melted and poured, which collapses the classification question and the sourcing question into one problem. Section 301 lists still sit on top of Chinese origin goods. IEEPA actions have added further layers, and they move. An AD/CVD scope decision can pull a product you have imported for years into a case with a cash deposit rate attached to it.

None of that is exotic any more. The work is getting origin, content and classification right before the entry is transmitted, rather than arguing about them afterwards with your money already at CBP.

Who we file for

Importers with weekly containers, and companies importing once. Foreign companies as well: you do not need a US entity to be the importer of record. A foreign importer is issued a CBP-assigned identification number in place of an EIN, and carries a bond with a US agent named to accept service of process. That agent requirement is the part that surprises people. It is paperwork, and we do it.