Select Committee on China and Congressional-Executive Commission on China Back DHS's Enforcement of UFLPA
Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) of the House Select Committee on China (SCC) and Chairman Chris Smith (R-NJ) of the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) have sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting a briefing on DHS’s implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA).
“Congress enacted these laws to ensure that illegally traded goods, particularly those made with forced labor, do not enter U.S. commerce and do not make American consumers complicit in atrocities, including genocide, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR),” the lawmakers write. “Strong enforcement protects human rights, supports American workers, and helps ensure that U.S. businesses are not undercut by illegal and unfair trade practices.”
The letter was also signed by SCC Ranking Member Ro Khanna (D-CA), CECC Commissioners Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and House Homeland Security Committee (HSC) Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-MS), HSC and SCC Member Carlos Gimenez (R-FL), and SCC Member Young Kim (R-CA).
The lawmakers request a briefing within 30 days addressing the following:
- Current DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force enforcement priorities across high-risk and priority enforcement sectors, including consumer goods, seafood, textiles and apparel, steel and aluminum, polysilicon, silane gas, silicon-carbon materials, critical minerals, and other advanced materials.
- Enforcement measures addressing forced-labor exposure in seafood supply chains, including vessel-based labor abuses, transshipment practices, and coordination with other federal agencies.
- The status of efforts to update and expand the UFLPA Entity List and any barriers or resource constraints to the listing of additional entities;
- Data on shipments detained, released, excluded, or seized under UFLPA and Section 307 authorities, including trends over the past year, sector-specific data, and country-of-shipment data.
- Current evidentiary standards required for importers to rebut the UFLPA presumption, including the types of supply-chain tracing, documentation, and verification CBP currently requires.
- Staffing levels and resources at CBP and DHS dedicated to UFLPA enforcement and FLETF duties, including any changes since 2024;
- How DHS is evaluating emerging supply chains, including silicon-carbon battery anodes, critical minerals, and other advanced materials, for forced-labor exposure.
- DHS’s efforts to investigate forced labor violations and other trade-related crimes, including in partnership with the Department of Justice’s Trade Fraud Task Force launched in August 2025 and other relevant federal agencies;
- DHS’s bilateral and multilateral engagements with foreign governments to promote enforceable forced-labor import bans, reduce diversion and transshipment, and strengthen international supply-chain accountability.
- How DHS is leveraging artificial intelligence to validate shipment country-of-origin and supply-chain documentation to identify potential UFLPA violations or other inconsistencies in shipment data.
Background
The UFLPA was signed into law in 2021, and marshals a whole-of-government approach to ending exploitative human suffering and prohibiting goods made with forced labor from the American free market. U.S. Customs and Border Protection maintains a public dashboard showcasing statistics on shipments subjected to UFLPA reviews and enforcement actions since 2022.
Ending slave labor is an ethical, economic, and national security priority for the Trump administration. This briefing request builds on the human rights movement's momentum sparked by the Trump administration's recent historic update to the the UFLPA Entity List. In July 2026, the Trump administration added 43 companies in the largest-ever expansion of the list since the enactment of the UFLPA in 2022.
Read the full letter here.