The Fax Machine at LAX Still Worked in 2024

The fish had been wild-caught from the Rio Negro, shipped to a holding facility in Manaus, then flown to Miami, then trucked to a consolidator in Orlando. By the time the batch reached a buyer in Los Angeles, nearly half had already been sold sight-unseen to other hobbyists. The remaining nine — six Heckels and three blues — were the reason a friend of a friend named Tomas found himself standing at the LAX baggage claim at 11:45 on a Tuesday morning, holding a Styrofoam box the size of a small suitcase, watching a CBP officer walk toward him with the particular gait of someone who has spotted something interesting.

Tomas is not an importer by trade. He runs a small commercial aquascaping business in Orange County, where he builds planted tanks for offices and restaurants. The discus were for his personal collection — or at least, that’s what he told himself when he agreed to pick them up for another hobbyist who had coordinated the group buy. The deal was simple: Tomas would collect the shipment at the airport, drive it to the other hobbyist’s place in Culver City, and take two of the Heckels as payment for his time.

What he didn’t know was that the shipment’s documentation had been prepared for air freight, not for hand-carry. The Bill of Lading listed the consolidator as the shipper, not an individual. The CITES permits were digital copies printed on plain paper rather than the required certified hard copies. And the fish — visibly wild, visibly expensive, visibly alive in their individual bags — were sitting in a passenger terminal where the customs process assumes travelers are importing souvenirs, not livestock.

Most hobbyists who import fish assume air freight is the complicated route and hand-carrying is the simpler one. The opposite is often true. Air freight passes through cargo customs, where the broker handles documentation and the fish clear in a facility designed for freight. Hand-carrying means the fish travel with the passenger and clear through passenger customs — which means the traveler becomes the importer of record, personally responsible for every piece of paper.

Tomas learned this the hard way when the CBP officer asked for the original CITES export permit from Brazil. What Tomas had was a PDF on his phone, emailed from the exporter. The officer explained that CITES requires physical certified documents for Appendix II species — which includes wild-caught discus — unless the shipment is accompanied by a valid CITES certificate issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Tomas had neither.

What he should have known: for hand-carried fish, the exporter must courier the original CITES permit to the traveler before departure, not email a scan. The physical document needs to match the shipment exactly — species, quantity, exporter name, importer name. If the importer name on the permit doesn’t match the traveler’s name on the passport, the shipment can be held or refused.

What to Prepare Before You Travel

Original CITES export permit from the country of origin — physical copy, signed and stamped. Email yourself a backup scan, but carry the original in your carry-on.
USFWS Form 3-177 (Declaration for Importation or Exportation of Fish or Wildlife) — fillable PDF available online. Print three copies.
Health certificate from the exporter, translated into English if necessary. Must be dated within 10 days of travel.
Commercial invoice or a straightforward statement of value — what was paid, to whom, in what currency. Be honest; undervaluing triggers inspection on principle.
Contact information for a USDA APHIS-endorsed vet in the U.S., just in case the fish need a holding inspection. Most discus shipments don’t, but having a name ready changes the tone of the conversation.

Tomas had none of these. He had a cooler full of fish, a phone with a PDF, and an increasingly anxious expression that the officer read immediately.

The Inspector Called It “Interesting”

The CBP officer at LAX called over a USFWS inspector from the secondary inspection area within about four minutes. The inspector, whose name Tomas never caught, asked the first question that matters in these situations: “Are these for commercial sale or personal collection?”

This is the single most important distinction in the entire process. Personal collection imports of wild discus are generally permitted with valid CITES documentation and a USFWS Form 3-177. Commercial imports require additional permits — specifically, a USFWS import/export license and, for certain species, a finding that the import would not be detrimental to the species’ survival. The documentation requirements are steeper, the fees are higher, and the timeline is measured in weeks, not hours.

Tomas answered honestly — personal collection — which was the right call. The inspector asked to see the fish. Tomas opened the cooler. The nine discus were packed individually in 3-mil polyethylene bags, each about a third full of water and two-thirds oxygen, inside a double-walled Styrofoam box with a heat pack taped to the lid. The water temperature was likely dropping — they’d been in transit for 18 hours at that point, and the heat pack had stopped producing warmth around hour 12.

The inspection itself was straightforward: the inspector counted the fish, checked that the species matched the CITES permit, and verified that the quantity did not exceed the permitted number. The problem was the permit itself. The digital copy listed the exporter as a Brazilian company but did not include Tomas’s name as the importer. The original document, back in Manaus, had the consolidator listed as the importer — a company that does not exist on any U.S. registration.

Three-Way Calling With a Portuguese Speaker at Dinner

The inspector explained that the fish could not be released without a valid CITES document. The options, as Tomas understood them:

The exporter couriers the original CITES permit with corrected importer information to LAX — minimum 48 hours, no guarantee the fish survive.
Tomas applies for an emergency USFWS import permit — possible but expensive, and requires a physical inspection of the fish at a USDA-approved facility.
The fish are seized and either re-exported or destroyed.

None of these options were good. The fish had been in bags for nearly a day. Another 48 hours would almost certainly mean losses. The emergency permit process requires a $150 application fee plus $90 for the USFWS inspection, plus facility costs if the fish can’t stay at the airport. And option three was not worth thinking about.

The inspector, to his credit, offered a fourth option. “If you can get the exporter to fax an amended permit to the USFWS office here, and I mean fax — not email — I can process it today.” The fax machine, at LAX in 2024, still sat on a desk in the secondary inspection office. The inspector gave Tomas a number.

What followed is what Tomas later described as “the worst hour of my adult life involving livestock.” He called the exporter in Manaus, who was six hours ahead and already closed for the day. He called the consolidator in Orlando, who had no authority to amend Brazilian export permits. He called the hobbyist in Culver City, who called the group buy organizer in Boston, who had the exporter’s personal cell number.

The exporter answered at 8:15 PM Manaus time. He was at a dinner. The conversation was in Portuguese, which Tomas does not speak, but the hobbyist in Culver City does — barely. Three-way calling with a Portuguese speaker on one end, a Spanish/Portuguese muddle in the middle, and an increasingly stressed discus hobbyist holding a fax number. The exporter agreed to send an amended permit. The problem: he had no fax machine at home. He had to drive back to his office.

A Leaking Bag and a Dead Heat Pack

This is the part of the story that experienced importers warn about and first-timers never believe: the fish have to survive the wait. Tomas had the cooler, the bags, and a heat pack that had already failed. The ambient temperature in the customs hall was about 68°F — survivable for discus in the short term, but not ideal. The fish were already stressed from handling, from the dark, from the movement of the flight.

A better setup, as Tomas now knows, would have included:

A battery-powered air pump with airstones that could be dropped into each bag individually if the wait stretched past 12 hours. The pump itself costs about $25. The airstones are a few dollars.
A backup heat source — either chemical hand warmers taped to the outside of the box (they activate slower but last longer than heat packs) or a USB-powered heating pad that runs off a power bank.
A spare bag or container, because bags leak. One of Tomas’s blue discus bags had developed a slow seep at the corner seam — not enough to lose the fish, but enough to wet the Styrofoam and accelerate temperature loss.
A notebook and pen, because customs officers ask for information — exporter names, addresses, dates — and trying to find a phone signal in a concrete building while holding a wet box is a specific kind of frustration.

The amended permit arrived by fax at 2:13 PM Pacific time. The inspector reviewed it, compared it to the bags on the table, and stamped the Form 3-177. The entire process — from the moment Tomas walked off the jet bridge to the moment he walked out of the terminal — had taken three hours and 22 minutes.

The Two Heckels That Didn’t Make It

The fish made it to Culver City. Two of the Heckels died within 48 hours — one from what appeared to be a bacterial infection picked up during the transit stress, the other for no reason Tomas could identify. The remaining seven settled into quarantine, started eating, and, six months later, are still alive in a 180-gallon planted tank that Tomas built specifically for them.

The total cost of the experience, beyond the purchase price of the fish:

$47 for the cooler and heat packs
$22 for parking at LAX for the four hours he was there
$14 for a sandwich from the terminal food court during the wait
$16 for the battery-powered air pump he bought afterward but wishes he’d had before
The two Heckels he was supposed to receive as payment — lost, along with any compensation for his time

The hobbyist in Culver City offered to pay for the dead fish. Tomas declined. It was not, he said later, the other hobbyist’s fault that the paperwork was wrong. It was everyone’s fault, and no one’s fault, and mostly it was the kind of mistake that only seems obvious in hindsight.

Tomas now keeps a folder in his car — physical, laminated documents — for any fish pickup. He asks to see the CITES permit before the shipment leaves the exporter’s facility, not after. He carries a backup heat source, a backup air source, and the phone numbers of both the USFWS inspector he met and the broker who handles the consolidator’s commercial shipments.

The inspector, before Tomas left, said something that stuck with him. “I see this about once a month. Someone gets a good deal on fish and doesn’t think customs applies to them. It’s not personal. It’s just that the paperwork exists because people used to bring in things they shouldn’t have.”

Seven months after the ordeal, the surviving discus are larger than any farmed fish Tomas has ever kept. The pattern on one of the Heckels shifted from dull brown to deep red and blue within three weeks of settling in. The tank gets visited by other hobbyists sometimes, people who ask where the fish came from and whether it was worth it. Tomas tells them the truth: the fish are worth it; the process almost wasn’t. He tells them to get the paperwork right before the flight leaves, to bring backup supplies, and to never assume that a digital copy is the same as an original. Most of them nod, and about half of them will still make the same mistakes he did.

The Fax Machine at LAX Still Worked in 2024