Is the US Still in the Fight Against Uyghur Forced Labor?

Yahoo

15-04-2025

On Friday, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee greenlit the latest in a flurry of legislative activity to protect ethnic minorities caught in China's brutal crackdown on Muslim populations, including what several authorities say are crimes against humanity that amount to genocide, though Beijing itself denies this.
The Uyghur Policy Act, originally introduced in the House of Representatives in 2023, has managed to pass with overwhelming bipartisan approval in both of the past two congressional terms without advancing further in the Senate. Young Kim, the Californian Republican who sponsored the bill, said it seeks to create a 'comprehensive, multilateral strategy' to raise international awareness of Uyghur persecution at home and abroad, direct the State Department to 'effectively respond' to human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and push back efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to 'silence Uyghur voices.'
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It comes amid an especially fraught time for U.S.-China relations, which are spectacularly unraveling as a trade spat characterized by escalating mutual tariffs shows no end in sight. The United States has also slapped visa sanctions on several Thai officials over the unexpected deportation of 40 Uyghur asylum seekers to China on Beijing's request in February. Both the United Nations' refugee agency and Volker Türk, its human rights head, panned the deportations for not only endangering the Uyghurs, who are expected to face torture and long-term imprisonment upon their return, but also for breaching international law. Already, some saw the move as a sign that the United States was ceding the soft power that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, funding—now 'fed to the woodchipper,' per billionaire and putative Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk—once supplied.
But the DOGE-powered Trump administration could also be sabotaging its long-running endeavor to combat Uyghur persecution, most notably in the form of the four-year-old Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, which imposes a rebuttable presumption that all goods made in whole or in part in Xinjiang are the product of forced labor and therefore impermissible in the United States under Section 307 of the 1930 Tariff Act.
The aggressive withdrawal of federal money has pummeled the likes of USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy—which sued, somewhat successfully, to restore its funding—and the Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs. Even the State Department, under which the dismantled remnants of USAID now fall, could see its budget slashed by half next fiscal year, according to a leaked internal memo that targeted spending on humanitarian assistance, international peacekeeping, global health and international bodies such as the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
All of this has eaten into the operations of civil society organizations. Just last month, the Uyghur Human Rights Project sent an email requesting donations to broaden its advocacy, research and humanitarian efforts 'on behalf of the Uyghur people.' The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which connected Uyghur forced labor to the fashion industry in a widely cited 2020 report, now has to suspend some of its research into China. And while China Labor Watch, a nonprofit whose mandate is 'shining light on labor practices kept in the dark,' had its frozen State Department funding restored last month in a rare rollback, peril still awaits in the form of continuing retrenchment.
This could create blindspots for Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection—two agencies that are bucking the layoff trend by growing their workforce—that make enforcement more difficult, said Ana Hinojosa, president of ABH Global Trade Consulting and a former executive director at CBP.
'Because CBP is in the U.S., and a lot of forced labor occurs in foreign countries, they're very highly reliant on one, ILAB being able to provide information on where they're finding, from their assessments, where there is forced labor in certain industries, and two, the indispensable information from non-governmental organizations that are very focused on highlighting human rights issues in different parts of the world,' she said.
Justin Dillon, CEO and founder of FRDM (pronounced 'freedom), an enterprise-grade software-as-a-service platform that helps companies manage regulatory and trade risks in the supply chain, said he understands why the government is making these cuts. But he also said that by failing to measure twice and cut once, it risks shutting down programs that can determine where forced labor comes from.
'CBP is hiring to get more auditors to audit shipments of which they require nonprofit data to inform their auditing,' he said. 'Does that make sense? What this administration is doing is it's cutting off a data flow, meaning it's allowing for unfair labor practices to happen elsewhere that is actually hurting U.S. jobs. We all agree that goods made with forced labor are unfair. We all agree that slavery is cheating. And the amount of funding being used to reduce forced labor elsewhere is just so small.'
Uyghurs who are being coerced into picking cotton in Xinjiang or forcibly dispatched to factories thousands of miles away from home are just part of that. Just last week, the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, a group of anti-slavery advocates chaired by former British prime minister Theresa May, warned that 'millions of lives are at risk' unless urgent, coordinated humanitarian action is taken to eliminate modern slavery across the globe by 2030. Writing in a report that she delivered to UN Secretary-General António Guterres in New York on Thursday, May denounced the fact that there are 28 million victims of forced labor globally as a 'moral stain on our humanity.'
'We see this as one of the biggest threats to progress on ending modern slavery, for slavery globally in years,' Chloe Cranston, head of thematic advocacy at Anti-Slavery International, the world's oldest anti-slavery organization, said of massive curtailment of U.S. foreign aid. 'Ultimately, one of the reasons forced labor is happening is because people are forced to take riskier opportunities to survive, and what's happened here is those protections that supported people to not have to take those risky decisions have been taken away.'
And that's only in the short term. In the long run, the hobbling of critical labor rights work to support collective bargaining and freedom of association could reverse decades of progress to create the type of enabling environments where modern slavery cannot thrive, 'creating an exponential rise in labor exploitation and forced labor,' she said.
'For us to hear that the Uyghur movement is affected is deeply, deeply concerning,' Cranston added. 'The Uyghur forced labor movement was already facing huge political obstacles due to the political economic influence of the Chinese government globally. So it is more important than ever that there is funding put behind sustaining the Uyghur movement.'
Insiders describe, if not actions that appear at cross purposes, then at least something resembling cognitive dissonance between CBP's keenness to build and maintain relationships with civil society organizations, which it relies on to submit allegations of trade violations, and the handicapping of those same organizations.
At the center of that is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a co-author of the UFLPA and a vociferous supporter of enhanced enforcement that would implement the law to its fullest. Congressman Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, criticized Rubio for failing to prevent the Uyghur deportations from Thailand, saying in March that the Trump administration has 'undermined U.S. credibility on human rights and our influence abroad.'
Others have looked askance at Rubio's appointment of Darren Beattie as the incoming undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, despite what lawmakers such as Congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachussets Democrat, called a 'disturbing record of denying that Uyghurs suffer genocide—despite such a determination made by the State Department.'
In February, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat and ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the CCP, urged Beattie to retract statements such as 'Chinese aren't genocidal. They just object to uyghur supremacy and uyghurness' and 'Taiwan will inevitably belong to China, it's only a matter of time,' which were posted on then-Twitter and now-X in 2021 and 2024, respectively.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
A staffer at a human rights nonprofit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of potential backlash, didn't see a disconnect, however.
'It's not that complicated; I don't think they care about human rights,' this person said of the White House. 'They don't really care about Uyghurs and they're proving it more when they drop funding. It's just political. Rubio doesn't want to ruffle any feathers. He wants to stick around as long as possible.'
At the same time, some benefits can be drawn from the United States and China face-off, albeit with some caveats, said Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He said that the unprecedented tariffs 145 percent tariffs, together with the elimination of the so-called de minimis 'loophole,' will have a 'dramatic impact' on trade between the two countries, making it harder for products linked to Uyghur forced labor to enter the United States.
'However, this should not be seen as a panacea for addressing the Uyghur forced labor issue from a standpoint of UFLPA enforcement,' he said. 'First, goods made in whole or in part with items from Xinjiang often enter Western countries via other nations involving obfuscated supply chains. Second, the actual value of many items made with lower-skilled Uyghur labor as part of a final sale price is often so low that even a 145 percent tariff does not significantly affect their price relative to alternative imports, thus failing to deter their importation outright.'
That combating forced labor in general and Uyghur forced labor in particular has always been one of the few issues both sides of the aisle can agree on is a source of befuddlement—and no small amount of frustration—to Luis C.deBaca, a professor of practice at the University of Michigan Law School who served, during the Obama administration, as both director of the Department of Justice's Office of Sex Offender Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehension, Registration and Tracking and an ambassador at large at the forefront of the State Department's work with tackling contemporary forms of slavery.
'CBP uses the DOL's list of goods produced by child labor or forced labor; that's the first thing they look at,' he said of the annual ILAB report, using an acronym for the Department of Labor. 'That's like taking away a highway patrolman's radar gun. If CDP can't immediately turn to DOL and say, 'What should we know about Argentina?' And then, DOL, because of the experts, are able to say, 'Watch out for, you know, X, Y and Z,' then you're blinding your watchdogs.'
The on-again, off-again reciprocal tariffs—the most recent of which are temporarily paused—could further exacerbate conditions because everyone's getting squeezed, C.deBaca said.
'I think, with the stress that companies and countries are going to be in, that you're going to see unscrupulous employers turn to worker abuse as a way to try to retain some kind of profitability,' he said. 'Which means more people enslaved, more people suffering and more slave-tainted goods coming into the United States, which I don't think the U.S. consumer wants, right? That's not something that they voted for.'
Li Qiang, founder and executive director at China Labor Watch, believes America's problem goes beyond funding. With a growing uncertainty in the human rights field about whether the U.S. government is still a reliable long-term partner, the 'erosion of trust' may lead some individuals and organizations to step away from the NGO space altogether, he said.
'The Trump administration's tough rhetoric on China and forced labor stands in contrast to the instability in funding and political support for human rights work,' he added. 'This contradiction sends mixed signals, raising concerns about the perceived neutrality of U.S.-funded human rights initiatives. While losing funding is never good news, even for organizations that still have support, the fight against forced labor remains incredibly challenging—especially when trust and continuity are in question.'