U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, is providing greater visibility into two of its enforcement platforms with a pair of “dynamic” statistics dashboards that allow interested stakeholders to delve deeper into the trade violation complaints it receives.
“With the launch of these dashboards, we are empowering the trade community and the public with clear insights into the scope and nature of trade violation allegations,” said Eric Choy, the agency’s executive director of trade remedy law enforcement. “These tools underscore our dedication to fair and effective trade enforcement by making key data accessible.”
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Through the Enforce and Protect Act dashboard, interested parties can track the volume, types and geographic locations of antidumping and countervailing duty evasion complaints submitted under the law, the enforcement of which has identified $1 billion in unpaid dues since its implementation in 2016.
The e-Allegations dashboard similarly tracks charges of unlawful trade practices that threaten individual businesses and harm the U.S. economy at large, such as counterfeit goods, duty evasion, import safety and forced labor. The data provided is based on the most recent statistics regarding the number and type of e-Allegations that CBP received through its online reporting tool.
Customs authorities received 36 complaints involving textiles and apparel in 2023, a 125 percent jump from the 16 it fielded in 2022 and the 15 it received in 2021. In January, the most recent month available, CBP received three allegations. Industry-spanning forced labor complaints saw a 91 percent year-over-year increase from 111 in 2022 to 203 in 2023. As with textiles and apparel, three allegations were submitted in January.
The dashboards arrived a year after CBP published a version that follows the number of shipments that have been detained, denied and released under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which for the past two years has imposed a rebuttable presumption that all goods originating from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are the products of forced labor by persecuted Muslim minorities and therefore inadmissible into the United States. The data can be parsed by sector, country of origin, fiscal year and admissibility judgment.
So far fiscal year 2024, which started in October and has information available through this past January, has seen the detention of 299 apparel, footwear and textile shipments worth $8.4 million. Of these, 91 valued at $1.6 million were denied entry. Another 26, worth $ 410,000, were let go. The final 182, valued at a combined $6.4 million, are listed as pending.
The Associated Press reported this week that freight from the Philippines is among those being held, a matter that Philippine trade secretary Alfredo Pascual raised in a meeting with Gina Raimondo, the U.S. commerce secretary, on Monday.
“Secretary Raimondo has committed to assist us on this issue,” Philippine trade undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo told the AP, without saying anything further. “We are working collaboratively with the U.S. side.”
The shipment has been in a holding pattern since November due to the suspicion that it contained Xinjiang cotton, according to a source close to the matter, which said that the Philippines is concerned about damage to its image as an apparel exporter to the United States, one of its largest product destinations. The majority of non-China imports blocked under the UFLPA have so far arrived from Malaysia and Vietnam. Since 2022, $10.7 million of shipments originating from Vietnam have been denied, more than three times the $3.1 million in goods from China that were given the no-go.
The European Union is also getting closer to a forced labor ban of its own following the European Council’s approval on Wednesday of the provisional agreement made earlier this month. Though criticized by civil society groups as less robust than the UFLPA, the regulation includes measures that can help competent national authorities identify and prevent products linked to modern slavery from entering (or leaving) the bloc. A European Parliament vote has to get sufficient ayes before it can percolate throughout the 27 member states by 2027.
“Everyone must be able to live and work in freedom and today, the European Council has taken one more step in a positive direction towards eradicating forced labor in supply chains,” said Helene de Rengervé, EU advisor at Anti-Slavery International. “We—alongside workers and allies all around the world—look ahead to the forthcoming Parliament vote. For over 20 million people in forced labor around the world, we hope this vote will proceed swiftly so the EU can truly demonstrate its commitment to ending forced labor.”
