America at 250: Can the US Get the World to Join Its Forced Labor Fight?
As the United States rings in 250 years of its founding ideals of liberty, a newer milestone is testing those values on the global stage. This year marks the fourth anniversary of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), America’s most ambitious effort to reshape global supply chains by requiring companies to prove their goods are free of state-sponsored forced labor targeting Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
But after several years of aggressive enforcement, the UFLPA’s vaunted ambitions are colliding with a messy reality. Human rights advocates warn of quiet backsliding, pointing to a recent drop in seized shipments and the stalled expansion of a list that would ban goods from companies linked to forced labor in China. Importers and industry groups say unpredictable customs delays and an opaque bureaucracy frequently leave time-sensitive shipments trapped in limbo with little justification. And critics of the law question whether it has done much to curb the Chinese government’s oppression of Uyghurs.
For the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region, a consortium of civil society organizations including Anti-Slavery International, the Clean Clothes Campaign, the Worker Rights Consortium and the Uyghur American Association, the UFLPA’s impact in addressing state-imposed forced labor has been enormous, if somewhat less pronounced of late.
Since taking effect in June 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has denied entry to more than 24,300 shipments, from apparel and textiles to photovoltaic components and drones, valued at nearly $4 billion. Recent research suggests the law has changed corporate behavior by creating legal and financial consequences for non-compliance and prompting companies to scrutinize their sourcing more closely, even down to the raw material level.
“A telltale indicator of how effective the law has been is the quick shift of supply chains out of the region, and then also the number of shipments that we saw that were stopped at the border once the law went into effect,” said Patricia Carrier, business and human rights advisor at Anti-Slavery International. “And also the fact that no company has been able to rebut the presumption of forced labor for shipments coming directly from the region.”
Indeed, much of the credit for the UFLPA’s success goes to its rebuttable presumption, which treats all products made in whole or in part in Xinjiang as the product of forced labor unless convincing evidence shows otherwise, said Dean Pinkert, a trade and human rights lawyer who served at the U.S. International Trade Commission under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. What has been less successful, however, is applying that presumption to goods that don’t originate directly from Xinjiang.
“It could be illegal transshipping, but it could also be labor transfer programs that cause workers to be shifted from Xinjiang to other parts of China,” he said. “To apply the rebuttable presumption to those goods or production facilities, a company has to be on the Entity List, and since the beginning of 2025, there have been no additions to the Entity List. We’re stuck at 144.”
The Entity List is an important resource for companies navigating shifting forced labor risks, especially outside Xinjiang, where overt detentions are giving way to more covert forms of persecution that standard corporate audits are less likely to detect, Carrier said.
“Once you have companies and entities that are known to be linked to forced labor programs, companies have a blueprint for identifying within their own supply-chain mapping whether they are linked to those companies,” she said.
CBP’s UFLPA statistics also show a palpable decline in the volume and value of shipments the agency stopped beginning in January 2025. In April, the most recent month for which data is available, CBP detained 542 shipments worth $7.9 million, down from 749 worth $188 million two years earlier.
At the same time, the targeting of shipments has not materially improved, said Nate Herman, executive vice president at the American Apparel & Footwear Association, a trade group whose roster includes major brands such as Gap Inc., H&M Group, J.Crew Group and Zara owner Inditex.
“There were 77 apparel shipments detained in April, 54 of which were subsequently released by CBP because importers had the information to prove the shipments had no nexus to Xinjiang,” he said. “You shouldn’t be seeing that many detained shipments being released if targeting were better. Obviously, mistakes happen, but it shouldn’t be 70 percent.”
Customs officials have become more cooperative with importers over time, said Angela M. Santos, a trade lawyer who leads Arent Fox Schiff’s task force on forced labor risks, but gaps in clarity and transparency still remain.
“Who is the problematic supplier? Where were the risks? More transparency would help importers understand what they need to do to secure release,” she said. “For admissibility reviews, it would be more efficient for CBP, suppliers and importers if it could simply identify the problematic tier, or where the risk lies. Requiring a full chain of documents isn’t necessarily the best way to prove there are no problematic inputs.”
In a statement, CBP said that it doesn’t comment on specific investigations, commodities or companies, nor does it disclose information or plans regarding forced labor enforcement activities, to protect law enforcement-sensitive and business-confidential information.
“CBP continues to prioritize enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and prevents the entry of goods into the United States that are at risk of being made with forced labor,” a spokesperson said. “CBP has maintained strong UFLPA enforcement year over year and will continue to hold non-compliant importers accountable for not conducting due diligence of their supply chains to ensure they comply with forced labor requirements.”
Exporting freedom
Washington has pushed other nations to establish domestic legislation that mirrors the UFLPA, with lawmakers, for example, calling for stronger enforcement of Article 23.6 of the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which bars goods denied in one country on forced labor grounds from being reexported to another, to help ensure all three nations fully comply with their treaty obligations. Others say weak import bans that fall short of the UFLPA’s standards are encouraging companies to build two separate supply chains: a “clean” one for the United States and a forced labor-tainted one for the rest of the world.
Now, the Trump administration appears to be doubling down after recent Section 301 investigations by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative into 60 of America’s top trading partners prompted proposals for global tariffs of up to 12.5 percent on nations without comparable import bans or robust forced labor enforcement. Among them were Canada, which the agency said was taking “only minimal action” to investigate imports subject to CBP’s Withhold Release Orders or Findings, and the European Union, which, despite passing the EU Forced Labour Regulation, won’t begin enforcing its restrictions until December 2027.
“The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable. This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field,” USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer said earlier this month. “We will no longer tolerate this disparity.”
Many have voiced doubts that this pivot is less about liberation and more about reviving a tariff regime that had been used as trade leverage until the Supreme Court struck it down in February.
Nevertheless, the fallout will be hardest on developing economies like Guatemala, Indonesia and Thailand, which lack the technical expertise and institutional capacity to block forced labor imports from complex global supply chains—a challenge compounded by the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, including the elimination of $500 million in grants aimed at strengthening workers’ rights and combating child and forced labor in 2025. Without ILAB’s support, poorer nations are now expected to meet stringent U.S. standards with limited resources of their own.
The AAFA, too, has warned that losing ILAB’s grants, which help stamp out opportunities for “less scrupulous foreign businesses to profit from labor abuses,” turns “an even playing field” into “an uphill battle” for its members and their 3.5 million U.S. workers.
“The irony is that you have a lot of countries agreeing to implement forced labor statutes—exactly what is being asked for in Section 301 investigations—but we’ve eliminated all technical capacity to help them set it up, so it really seems to undercut the argument here,” Herman said. “If you really wanted to address the issue, tariffs are not the best way to do that.”
To be sure, there is no one-size-fits-all forced labor law, as much as the United States might want the rest of the world to adopt a blanket ban along the lines of Section 307 of the 1930 Tariff Act, the foundational statute from which the UFLPA derives its enforcement authority, Santos said. There’s also a meaningful difference between private-sector exploitation and state-imposed forced labor. When labor coercion is government-driven, standard corporate remediation isn’t an option; only divestment is.
“I think the U.S. wants to serve as a guidepost for other countries for anti-slavery laws, but countries are different, they have different cultures and they have different resources,” she said. “Certainly, I think forced labor is another negotiating lever, but it’s hard to predict how the administration is going to use forced labor in their broader trade strategy.”
Shawn McDonald, CEO of the fair labor nonprofit Verité, said that durable change requires sustained investment and the conditions needed for effective implementation. While tariffs may send a strong enforcement signal, they “cannot on their own address the complex, systemic drivers of forced labor in global supply chains.”
With the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose funding supported local advocacy groups and independent unions, McDonald fears the loss of on-the-ground intelligence will leave everyone operating blindly in an “increasingly data-poor environment.”
“What is AI going to hallucinate about the state of labor when there aren’t many good reports out there, right?” he said.
As a Uyghur living in the United States, Jewher Ilham, the Worker Rights Consortium’s forced-labor project director, has mixed feelings about her relative freedom. Her father, economist Ilham Tohti, an outspoken critic of China’s policies toward Uyghurs, was sentenced to life in prison on separatism charges.
What Ilham wants to stress is that forced labor mechanisms should be worker-focused instruments rather than political tools. She said she hopes countries passing import bans are doing so for the right reasons, not to avoid a trade war. At the same time, she worries that gaps in UFLPA enforcement will leave more Uyghurs vulnerable to Beijing’s repressive policies.
“I hope CBP and the U.S. government realize that corporations have a very strong incentive to comply with laws like the UFLPA only if they believe they will be caught when they don’t comply,” Ilham said. “And I have to emphasize the expansion of the Entity List. Having 144 is just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands with evidence submitted to CBP.”
And it’s a battle that has deep roots in American history, even if the results have been mixed.
“I would say the fight against forced labor—and especially state-imposed forced labor—is a fight that goes to the very root of the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” Pinkert said. “The deprivation of freedom of association, freedom of movement and freedom of speech are all implicated by state-imposed forced labor—and by forced labor more broadly. So when we talk about this fight, we’re really talking about our most basic values.”
