CBP's Office of Field Operations Launches OFO Strategy 2026-2030: What It Signals for Trade Enforcement

CBP Field Operations Officers Standing by Customs and Border Protection Truck in Desert

On August 6, 2026, U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) unveiled the “OFO Strategy 2026-2030,” a four-year roadmap guiding how CBP’s largest component will safeguard U.S. travel, trade, and agriculture through fiscal year 2030.

The strategy follows Congress’s passage of the Secure America Act, which guarantees multiyear funding for CBP and ICE operations through fiscal year 2029, and comes amid a broader federal push to strengthen customs and trade enforcement. See our companion article on DOJ’s Global Trade & Commerce Enforcement Section.

As CBP’s largest component and primary law enforcement presence at the nation’s ports of entry, OFO oversees enforcement of customs, immigration, and agriculture laws across 19 field offices, 328 ports of entry, and 113 international locations in 48 countries.

In fiscal year 2025 alone, OFO processed approximately 380 million travelers and $3.6 trillion in import cargo, while seizing more than 504,000 pounds of illicit drugs and intercepting 1.7 million prohibited plant and animal products.

Four Strategic Goals

The OFO Strategy 2026-2030 is organized around four goals, each with its own set of implementation objectives:

• National Security: Expands intelligence-based targeting, risk-based enforcement analytics, and interagency and international partnerships to detect and stop threats before they reach U.S. borders.

• Economic Security: Modernizes the legal and regulatory tools OFO uses to enforce trade laws, standardizes procedures to keep pace with supply chain threats and evolving smuggling tactics, and expands trade and agriculture risk training for officers.

• Integration: Builds a unified technical architecture connecting OFO’s systems, standardizes policy development, and improves internal and external communications.

• Workforce Cultivation: Strengthens recruiting and hiring, expands professional development, and invests in employee support systems.

What This Could Mean for Importers

The Economic Security goal is the one importers and brokers should watch most closely. CBP has signaled that it intends to modernize enforcement tools, standardize procedures across ports, and expand officer training specifically around trade and supply chain risk.

For importers, these priorities could translate into more consistent and technically sophisticated scrutiny of entries at the port level, particularly as new tools, procedures, and training are implemented.

The strategy also does not exist in a vacuum. It follows DOJ’s July 14 announcement that its Trade Fraud Task Force has surpassed $1 billion in recoveries and the creation of a dedicated Global Trade & Commerce Enforcement Section.

Read together, these developments point to an increasingly coordinated and well-funded enforcement environment spanning both the port-of-entry level through CBP and OFO and the prosecutorial level through DOJ. CBP’s own commissioner-level messaging also explicitly frames trade enforcement as a matter of national and economic security.

What Importers Should Do

• Prepare for greater consistency across ports. OFO’s Economic Security objectives emphasize standardized procedures and stronger trade enforcement capabilities.

• Revisit classification, valuation, and country-of-origin documentation. Importers should identify potential weaknesses before an inquiry or enforcement action occurs, particularly as OFO works to modernize the tools used to enforce trade laws and hold violators accountable.

• Watch for implementation guidance. Monitor CBP guidance, CSMS messages, and other announcements that may put the strategy’s Economic Security and Integration objectives into practice over the coming months.