Customs and Border Protection has changed how it’s implementing America’s forced labor import ban, prompting questions from lawmakers, human rights activists and China hawks who are watching how President Donald Trump’s administration will handle the issue.
Those questions have renewed urgency now that Trump has launched additional tariffs on many countries, which will take time and manpower for customs officials to implement, and may detract from forced labor prevention efforts.
When the landmark Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act went into effect in June 2022, solar panels with suspected manufacturing ties to slave labor started to pile up at U.S. ports. But now, two-and-a-half years later, those seizures have fallen off a cliff — and the overall value of shipments halted under the ban has plummeted to the lowest level since CBP’s first week implementing the law.
Some members of Congress worry it isn’t a priority for Trump, even as they’re reluctant to criticize CBP’s work to implement such an ambitious law.
“One of my biggest fears about this administration is that they don’t give a damn about human rights,” Rep. Jim McGovern, the Massachussetts Democrat who sponsored the bipartisan forced labor prevention law, told NOTUS of Trump. “But I want to give them the benefit of the doubt until I get some clarification.”
Trade industry experts and people familiar with implementation of the forced labor ban emphasized in interviews with NOTUS that the changes don’t necessarily mean CBP is slacking. Some noted that the number of shipments halted for review has gone up, even if the value of those shipments is much lower than the products that previously faced scrutiny.
In February, customs officials halted just $9.2 million in shipments under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, according to the CBP database that tracks goods stopped for suspected ties to forced labor. In comparison, officials targeted nearly $280 million in shipments for review during February the year before.
January this year saw roughly $10 million in shipments halted, compared with around $212 million in January of last year. December 2024 was similar, with about $9.5 million in shipments halted. In December 2023, officials stopped $168 million in imports. This shift isn’t explained by just a change in administrations: A clear drop in the value of shipments halted under the law is noticeable across the summer of 2024, when Joe Biden was president, and another drop is evident between October 2024 — which saw $31.7 million in shipments halted under the law — and November 2024, when that value fell to $12.7 million. (October 2023’s figure was $171 million. And November 2023, in comparison, saw $103 million in shipments halted.)
At the same time, the electronics sector has gone from topping the enforcement leaderboard to seeing hardly any detentions. Instead, products from the automotive and aerospace industries are beginning to make up the bulk of shipments detained for potential links to forced labor in China.
“Electronics is solar. Pretty much only solar,” one source who is familiar with the law’s implementation told NOTUS of the data compiled by CBP. This source hypothesized that officials have perhaps “turned their attention away from solar a bit since they’ve done it for so long and compliance seems to be up.”
Even if compliance has improved, John Foote, a trade attorney who has tracked the law’s rollout, told NOTUS that solar companies “definitely” haven’t stopped trying to send the products that had previously raised alarms with customs officials into the United States.
“There are limited enforcement resources, and this is the new priority,” Foote wrote in a message to NOTUS. “Only CBP could say why. (And they aren’t saying.)”
A CBP spokesperson did not answer questions from NOTUS about the dramatic shift in data but responded after this story’s publication: “Over the past several years, CBP has become a global leader in forced labor enforcement, and the agency’s efforts serve as a global catalyst for actions.”
“I know this issue is a priority of the president,” Rep. Chris Smith, the New Jersey Republican who sponsored the forced labor prevention law, told The Wall Street Journal recently. Officials “will also have lots of support in Congress for vigorous UFLPA enforcement.”
For some members of Congress, the dashboard doesn’t provide enough clarity into CBP’s work.
“CBP needs to be much more transparent about what it is doing to keep products made with forced labor — including Uyghur forced labor — out of U.S. supply chains,” Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told NOTUS in a statement. “Any shift in resources or focus away from UFLPA enforcement would be highly concerning.”
When lawmakers first passed the ban, they hoped to have a clear window into how the executive branch enforced it. Members of Congress included language in the legislation requiring customs officials to share details and explain their reasoning any time they approved an exception from the ban. But instead of considering shipments under the process laid out in the law and reporting those exceptions to Congress, CBP created a separate system for companies to adjudicate their claims without being subject to the reporting requirement. This system is not as strict as the law’s “clear and convincing” threshold for evidence against forced labor, according to lawyers who work on these cases.
CBP’s recent shift in how it is implementing the law just raises more oversight questions for Congress.
“When it first started up, obviously it took some time to get it up and running,” McGovern said in an interview. “But we’re in a new administration now, so all the progress we thought we made with the last administration, we have to reassess where we are with this administration.”
“The situation with the Uyghurs is quite desperate,” he continued. “These are serious human rights violations, and it would be a scandal if somehow we would retreat from what the whole purpose of that bill is about.”
Robert Kossick, another trade attorney who has followed the UFLPA closely, told NOTUS that Trump’s new tariffs could complicate CBP’s enforcement of the law.
It has been an “enormous lift” for trade officials to issue notices, respond to questions from the trade community and act on the sweeping changes Trump has ordered, he said.
“Regardless, it’s curious that Trump hasn’t seized on UFLPA in the way he has other statutes as a tool for exerting leverage,” Kossick said.
Update: This story has been updated with comment from CBP.
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.