Customs has finally written the ship-to-ship crew classifications a 2023 statute created, and the benefit column of its own table says one of the changes will have no benefits
Three years and seven months.
That is the gap between the Energy Security and Lightering Independence Act of 2022, signed into law on 5 January 2023, and the regulation implementing it, which Customs and Border Protection filed on Monday and which takes effect the moment it is published on Tuesday. The statute created a route into the United States for foreign crews who perform ship-to-ship liquid cargo transfers, the practice the industry calls lightering, and set the ceiling at 180 days. The regulations went on saying 29.
What the old arrangement looked like
Before the statute, the document says, lightering crew generally did not qualify for admission as a transit nonimmigrant or for temporary landing privileges as a crewman. Both routes capped a stay at 29 days, and lightering work runs longer than that.
So Customs used parole instead, case by case, for up to 180 days. It estimates that 6,500 foreign crew, performing duties of every kind, were paroled each year on that basis, and it says plainly that the parole process prevented it from working out how many of the 6,500 were there to work on lightering vessels.
That estimate is the only quantity in the rule, and its footnote is worth reading. It is the figure of a subject matter expert in the Office of Field Operations Admissibility and Passenger Programs Directorate, arrived at from informal input from the trade community.
The guidance moved first
The rule adds two classifications, C-4 for admission in transit and D-3 for temporary landing, to the tables at 8 CFR 214.1. It also fixes two wrong cross references, one of which had the C-3 designation pointing at the wrong subsection of the statute.
Ports have been using C-4 and D-3 since October 2024. The document footnotes interim guidance from the Executive Director of Admissibility and Passenger Programs dated 23 October 2024, roughly a year and nine months after the statute, which told the field to admit lightering crew into the new classes. Tuesday's rule is the regulations catching up to a practice already running.
That sequencing is also why the rule arrives without a comment period. DHS found good cause to skip notice and comment on the basis that the amendments are either required by the statute or non-substantive technical corrections, and that the agency has no discretion in creating the classifications, so comment could not change what it must do. It waived the 30 day delayed effective date for the same reason.
The benefit column
Table 1 of the rule lists each amendment with a cost and a benefit. Every cost entry reads that there is none. The benefits are thinner than that phrasing implies: the row covering the addition of D-3 and C-4 to the nonimmigrant classification table records that the change "is required by ESLIA and will have no benefits."
The rule's stated payoff sits elsewhere and is a counting one. Customs says the main benefit compared with the old arrangement is data, because it will now be able to identify and track the exact number of lightering personnel admitted or granted landing privileges, and because codifying the statutory pathway reduces how often it reaches for parole. It ties that second point to Executive Order 14159 and its instruction that parole be used case by case.
The Office of Management and Budget did not review the rule. It was not designated a significant regulatory action, and the document records that it does not count as a deregulatory action under Executive Order 14192 either, because it performs an immigration function.
Elsewhere in the text sits the small operational change a crewing manager will care about. A crewman granted temporary landing under the new 180 day paragraph may leave on a different vessel, or by air, without filing Form I-408.
