Preventing the importation of goods into the United States produced with forced or slave labor from predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region has long been a goal of the U.S. government.
Since 2019, the Department of Homeland Security—the lead federal agency responsible for enforcing civil and criminal laws to disrupt and dismantle attempts at importing goods produced with forced labor—has taken numerous enforcement actions against Chinese companies using government-sponsored forced labor.
Given the importance of this mission, as acting secretary of Homeland Security, I established the first-ever Center for Countering Human Trafficking in 2020. By doing so, I was signaling that we were no longer going to sit on the sidelines while these despicable crimes proliferated. We quickly turned our attention to the Chinese entities peddling goods from Xinjiang.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of the use of forced labor in Xinjiang continued. Then Congress stepped in. In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) was signed into law to strengthen the existing prohibition and to support enforcement actions to stop such goods at U.S. ports of entry. But is this law being fully implemented?
Recent reporting regarding Temu—an online marketplace whose parent company is based in China and is allegedly directly affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—raises serious concerns regarding its use of forced labor and U.S. government enforcement of the law designed to prevent it.
In 2023, Temu became the most downloaded app in the United States. However, as Americans rush to purchase these inexpensive products marketed to users on social media, they likely don’t realize the cost is far greater than the price they pay for them.
As a result, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have recently requested that President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas investigate Temu for possible violations of U.S. law and take swift action. Such action could include inclusion on an Entity List, barring Temu products from being imported into the United States.
This comes at a time when Temu is capturing a significant amount of U.S. market share and has recently displaced Amazon, Target, and Walmart as the No. 1 shopping app on Apple’s App Store. Ensuring that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is properly enforced not only is ethical and humane but also supports a level playing field for U.S. companies that respect fair labor standards.
Unlike other companies with suspected CCP ties, such as TikTok, Congress doesn’t have to pass a new law to address this issue. There is already a law on the books to protect Americans from unwittingly supporting the use of slave labor in China and to shut off a revenue stream from these nefarious companies. Now is the time for the Biden administration to use it.
Allowing companies such as Temu to brazenly defy our laws cannot be tolerated. Ending forced labor is a moral, economic, and national security imperative. With the passage of the UFLPA, the U.S. government has the tools at its disposal to hold companies accountable.
The Biden administration needs to enforce the law and send a message to Temu and other similar companies that skirting U.S. forced labor laws will not go unanswered.