Trump Hit Countries With Tariffs Over Forced Labor, While Slowing Enforcement Of Its Own Ban

President Donald Trump’s latest wave of tariffs are based on allegations that other countries aren’t doing enough to combat forced labor. At the same time, his administration has quietly pulled back enforcement of a U.S. ban on goods made with Chinese forced labor as it tries to maintain a trade truce with Beijing.

In the first year and a half of Trump's second term, his administration did not add any new companies to a trade blacklist for businesses that source goods from the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has detained more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities in a campaign the U.S. government has called genocide. The blacklist, which was mandated under a 2021 law and is overseen by multiple agencies, presumes goods from Xinjiang are made by people coerced or forced to work against their will, and bars those items from entering the United States.

After POLITICO published this report for subscribers, the Department of Homeland Security issued an update adding more than 40 new Chinese companies to the blacklist, effective Aug. 3.

The value of goods held up at the border over suspicion they were made wholly or partly in Xinjiang has also plummeted under Trump — from $1.76 billion in fiscal year 2024 to $166 million in fiscal 2025, according to data from Customs and Border Protection.

The freeze means the government has stopped publicly identifying new companies it suspects of sourcing from Xinjiang — in at least one instance shelving a batch of firms its own task force had already approved for the blacklist, according to two former officials, including one who worked on trade during the second Trump administration. And it could undercut the premise for the president’s latest tariffs on major trading partners, which the administration justified on the grounds that forced labor overseas is hurting American competitiveness, while claiming the U.S. is “the only country in the world to adopt, and effectively enforce, a ban on imports made with forced labor.”

"If the U.S. wants to see other countries effectively enforce forced labor import bans, they're going to have to do it themselves, as well," said Laura Murphy, a former senior policy adviser at the Department of Homeland Security under President Joe Biden who helped implement the Uyghur forced labor ban when it first became law.

The Tariff Act of 1930 bars all goods made even partly with forced, indentured or convict labor from entering the country. In addition, Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act with near-unanimous bipartisan support in December 2021. Then-GOP senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a lead sponsor for the Senate version of the bill.

Under Biden, the federal government built the forced-labor blacklist up to more than 140 entities, including 29 added in November 2024 and another 37 in January 2025, days before Trump was sworn in for a second term.

From January to December 2024, the last year of Biden’s presidency, Customs also detained an average of 1,039 shipments it suspected of being linked to forced labor in Xinjiang each month, CBP data shows. During the first year of Trump’s presidency, it fell to an average of 886 shipments per month. In the first four months of 2026, CBP has averaged just 788 monthly detentions.

In total, four people, including two former officials who worked on trade during the Trump administration and two others briefed by current staff, attribute the drop primarily to concerns about upsetting the Chinese government as Trump pursues an ambitious trade and economic deal with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The people and others who spoke with POLITICO also blamed shifting priorities within CBP as well as staffing cuts for the decline.

The White House and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Treasury Department declined to comment.

The administration, however, has said publicly that it is still enforcing the measure. In June, CBP issued new guidance on the measure for importers — telling companies to expect scrutiny of supplier relationships and origin records, and to conduct due diligence before importing.

And one U.S. official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the lower number and value of parcels stopped at the border reflect stronger deterrence, not weaker enforcement, arguing that importers have cleaned up their supply chains and that fewer detentions mean the law is working.

The Department of Homeland Security oversees the interagency panel that manages the blacklist of companies suspected of sourcing labor from Xinjiang, which also includes the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Treasury, State, Commerce, Labor and Justice departments.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer are also the lead negotiators in ongoing trade talks with China dating back to May 2025.

Their efforts to calm tensions between the U.S. and China intensified last October, as China took steps to cut off the global flow of critical minerals after the Trump administration expanded an unrelated technology blacklist that targeted Chinese firms. Trump and Xi agreed to step back from those measures after meeting in Busan, South Korea.

Three of the people who spoke to POLITICO, including two former Trump trade officials, said senior administration officials have been wary not to upset that detente, contributing to the declining enforcement of the ban on goods from Xinjiang.

"They don't want to anger China because of the critical minerals," said one of the former Trump trade officials, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

That balancing act is now running up against another plank of Trump’s trade agenda, however.

Last week, the White House imposed double-digit tariffs on 60 trading partners after conducting a quickfire investigation that concluded their governments were not doing enough to prevent forced labor in their supply chains.

Foreign governments and legal experts, however, have questioned the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s probe, which was launched in March shortly after the Supreme Court struck down global tariffs the president imposed in 2025 under a different law. Administration officials made clear even before the court’s ruling that they were preparing options to rebuild those tariffs under different legal authorities, should they lose the case. The final order, issued last week, set duties at between 10 and 12.5 percent on major U.S. trading partners.

In a July 27 statement, China’s Ministry of Commerce accused the U.S. of having “manipulated” the issue of forced labor to push forward with ”unilateralist and protectionist behavior.” And the Chinese Embassy strongly denied allegations that it has committed genocide against its Uyghur minority.

"China firmly opposes the wrongful practice of the United States using human rights as a pretext to smear other countries, interfere in their internal affairs, suppress their companies, and contain their development," the Chinese Embassy said in a statement. "Through industrial development, vocational skills training, and employment services, Xinjiang has helped people of all ethnic groups secure stable employment, increase their incomes, and improve their lives."

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also noted in a post on X that his country has ratified several international labor treaties that the United States is not party to. And while the European Union noted the 10 percent rate respected the trade deal the two sides struck last year, some officials rejected the premise, insisting the bloc already backs strict bans on goods made with forced labor.

Two groups of businesses have already sued in federal trade court, arguing the administration set the tariff rates first and then crafted the forced labor findings to justify them.

Legal experts are split on whether the challenge will succeed. But the slowdown in enforcement of one of the United States’ own forced labor laws is not likely to bolster the businesses' arguments, according to Kathleen Claussen, a professor at Georgetown Law. She pointed out there is nothing in the Section 301 statute that says the U.S. can only target trade practices the U.S. does not engage in.

The Trump administration, for its part, maintains that it continues to fully ban goods made with forced labor. In a July 23 call with reporters announcing the results of the probe, a senior administration official took pains to emphasize that the U.S. government "continued to rigorously enforce its own labor laws," including "designating new entities" under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

The president issued an executive order in June to overhaul customs enforcement and directed DHS and the Justice Department to prioritize forced labor cases — though the order made no mention of the Xinjiang import ban.

Two former CBP officials and a former State Department official who worked on forced-labor issues say that other factors besides diplomacy with China are also at play in the declining enforcement figures, including downsizing at many of the offices and agencies responsible for carrying out the Uyghur forced-labor law, including at DHS and the State Department.

"The actual team that was doing a lot of the work within DHS has largely been dismantled," one of the former CBP officials said.

The Trump administration has also shifted more resources at CBP to focus on enforcing the president’s tariffs and combating efforts to evade them.  

Maximizing tariff revenue has been a “huge thing” in the second Trump administration, said Simeon Yerokun, a former CBP official in the office of chief counsel and now a trade lawyer at Crowell & Moring.

Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Hudson Institute think tank and a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) expressed concerns in an interview that those priorities as well as the broader geopolitical dance with China are defanging the Uyghur ban.

It “only really works if the upstream decisions are already made, and if we're comfortable having a fundamentally competitive posture toward the Chinese Communist Party,” said Sobolik. “The administration has been skittish about angering China,” but “If we tell ourselves that any little tiny thing we do to counter China, they’re just going to restrict critical mineral flow again, then we can’t do anything.”