The Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to bring back its practice of imposing blanket restrictions on importation and exportation of species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the agency said in a notice released June 21.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control this week revised 15 entries on its Specially Designated Nationals List. The entries have ties either to the U.S.-sanctioned National Iranian Tanker Company or the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. OFAC didn’t release more information.

The Census Bureau briefly experienced an “unscheduled outage” of the Automated Export System during the morning of June 7, the agency said in an email to industry. Census activated its AES downtime policy during the outage and reminded exporters to file all Electronic Export Information for shipments that were exported under the downtime policy, along with any new AES transactions, to receive an Internal Transaction Number. "Due to the high volume of shipments that are being processed at this time, please be patient in obtaining an AES response message," Census said. "Do not submit shipments more than once."

CBP this week deployed a new export manifest-related informational response message in the Automated Commercial Environment’s (ACE) certification environment “for the Ocean House Bill Release,” CBP said in a June 6 CSMS message. New message 610 will appear with the description “Empty Vessel (Departure Message – No bill associated to that vessel),” CBP said. “A date for release to the Production environment will be sent in a future message.”

CBP this week set a new release date for two new Automated Export System messages -- 97H and 97R -- that will allow officers to alert exporters of hold and release messages (see 2305100062). The messages will now be deployed May 25, the agency said in a May 24 CSMS message. CBP delayed the release earlier this month (see 2305170021).

The Census Bureau emailed tips May 18 on how to address the most frequent messages generated this month in the Automated Export System.

CBP is delaying the rollout of two new Automated Export System messages -- 97H and 97R -- that will allow officers to alert exporters of hold and release messages (see 2305100062), the agency said in a May 17 CSMS message. CBP said it will provide a new release date “at a later time.”

CBP is changing its procedures for seizures and forfeitures so that it will now provide public notice of an impending forfeiture at the same time it notifies parties with a potential interest in the goods, the agency said in a notice released May 15.

The Census Bureau is nixing plans to update its Automated Export System early with a new proposed export filing requirement for certain U.S. Munitions List exports, CBP said in a May 10 CSMS message. Census last week said it planned to update the AESDirect web application May 9 with the new data element (see 2305040024) even though it had just proposed the electronic export filing requirement one day earlier and was still soliciting public comments on the change, which are due July 3 (see 2305020007).

CBP will soon allow its officers to alert exporters of hold and release messages in the Automated Export System, the agency said in a May 10 CSMS message. Beginning May 18, AES filers can begin receiving two informational messages in AES: response code 97H for when a shipment has been placed on hold, and response code 97R for when a shipment is released. CBP said both codes have been added to the Automated Export System Trade Interface Requirements Appendix A “and are ready for testing in certification.”