The effectiveness of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is something that continues to dog the law three years after it went into force in June 2022.
In the time since, Customs and Border Protection has prevented nearly 10,500 shipments valued at nearly $1 billion from entering the United States because of products or components that could have originated in China’s contentious Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Another 6,000 shipments, amounting to almost $3 billion in apparel, textiles, automotive parts and electronics, were released back into the wild. Some American trade groups consider that a poor batting average that has resulted in more unjustified seizures than actual hits, making it, in turn, bad for business. Other experts have questioned whether the sanctions have influenced Beijing’s behavior for the better.
Related Stories
But the UFLPA’s implementation, more than reflecting an evolution in U.S. policymaking on forced labor, has created bigger ripples in the broader regulatory landscape, a recent report argued. Three years later, Canada and Mexico have outlawed goods made using forced labor, and the European Union’s forced labor ban is poised to take effect in 2027. Other jurisdictions, too, are considering similar efforts of their own.
Writing for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization, Laura Murphy and Charlotte Tate noted that a “somewhat common and startling misconception” about forced labor import bans is that a law that fails to immediately end the practice should be viewed as less of a success. Likewise, they said, observers will sometimes conclude that the UFLPA is a bust, either because “CBP is not catching every prohibited shipment or because the PRC government continues to oppress the Uyghur people.”
“However, this places an unrealistic expectation on the impact that this law, and laws in general, can have in the short (and even long) term,” they said. “We do not believe that laws prohibiting murder fail because we do not catch all of the murderers and we have not ended murder in our society. The criteria for impact must be more attuned to what the law was intended to do and what it can practically accomplish. When more informed and relevant metrics are used, it becomes clear that the impact of the UFLPA has been enormous.”
To gauge the UFLPA’s impact, Murphy and Tate looked at four key questions: Has the U.S. government been able to enforce the law? Has it changed corporate behavior and increased compliance? Has the UFLPA led to negative consequences for those who don’t comply? And has it influenced the lives and livelihoods of those it was meant to impact? Even with the last, they said, there are signs that the pressure campaign is having a positive effect, even though it will take some time before the full impact of the UFLPA on Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities can be understood.
Murphy and Tate’s assessment comes just as the State Department flagged China as one of 13 countries with a documented “policy or pattern” of human trafficking, trafficking in government-funded programs, forced labor in government-affiliated medical services or other sectors, sexual slavery in government camps or the employment or recruitment of child soldiers.
China does not fully meet the minimum standards for eliminating human trafficking, nor is it making significant efforts to do so, putting it alongside so-called Tier 3 countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia and Sudan, the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, or TIP, wrote in the 2025 edition of its Trafficking in Persons Report.
In fact, it added, the Chinese Communist Party continues to exploit ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region through a state-sanctioned policy of widespread forced labor, including through mass arbitrary detentions under the pretext of “vocational training” and “deradicalization.”
The government has also maintained a practice of placing non-Han Chinese groups in vocational training and manufacturing jobs as part of “poverty alleviation” and “labor dispatch” schemes that featured “overt coercive elements,” as well as sought to coerce the repatriation and internment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and others living abroad through surveillance, harassment and threats that increased their vulnerability to the government’s pattern or policy of forced labor, the TIP Office said.
“Like human trafficking in general, official complicity has become more ‘invisible’ as governments attempt to reframe it as something else,” it said. “For example, governments have shifted from imposing detention center labor to creating so-called economic development or communal service opportunities and then requiring workers to participate in them.”
Such is the case with China, which has defended its actions and policies as part of a legitimate economic development initiative, rather than a religious and cultural crackdown underpinned by a desire to “destroy” the essential elements of ethnic identity—one of the hallmarks of genocide—as leaked government documents have suggested.
In a statement responding to the report this week, Congressman John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called China’s “genocide” of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang a “human trafficking nightmare.”
“Last year, China made billions of dollars off of these heinous acts,” he said. “That’s why American companies must do more to comply with the UFLPA and make sure their supply chains are not using products made with forced labor.”
Even so, the UFLPA—and the enforcement thereof—isn’t perfect, Murphy and Tate wrote in their paper. Detentions this past April and May took a “notable downturn,” for instance, with only a short return to average detentions in June. The following month, however, CBP only stopped 14 shipments, which they described as an “unprecedentedly low number” that “raises questions about the agency’s current ability to prioritize enforcement of the law.”
While the researchers cited speculation that once the Trump administration’s tariff determinations are settled, enforcement will climb back up, they also expressed uncertainty in whether the law will be able to achieve its “greatest potential impact.”
“Political will is critical to the continued effectiveness of the UFLPA,” Murphy and Tate said. “Since the Trump administration took office again in January, we have not yet seen a commitment to wielding the UFLPA effectively. No new entities have been added to the list, and CBP’s detentions have fallen. Without effective enforcement of the law, importers may determine that compliance is costlier than buying artificially cheap goods made in the XUAR.”
Even so, there are few sanctions as strong and effective as the UFLPA, Murphy and Tate insisted. The Trump administration can deploy the law to punish unfair trade practices—and nip illegal transshipment in the bud—by directing the Forced Labor Enforcement Taskforce to expand the UFLPA Entity List of bad actors and adding more products made in whole or in part with Uyghur forced labor to the Labor Department’s List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor. Instead of capitulating to the widespread federal funding cuts that have left many civil society organizations hanging by a thread, the State and Labor Departments should double down on supporting research on supply chains that could harbor Uyghur forced labor, they said.
“But the UFLPA does not depend on the U.S. government alone,” the report added, pointing to a KPMG survey that found that 68 percent of companies were only reviewing their Tier 1 and/or Tier 2 suppliers. “While some companies have demonstrated leadership in reorienting supply chains and establishing traceability, many companies are not going far enough in their due diligence. This leaves the furthest reaches of their supply chains—where Uyghur forced labor is most likely to be a risk—in the dark, exposing companies to surprise detentions that they are not prepared to defend against.”
Reticence to “truly conduct deep dives” into supply chains will put companies at serious risk of noncompliance and lower the chances that Uyghur forced labor will be eradicated from supply chains. If, in the coming months, CBP expands its enforcement and FLETF designates new sectors as high priorities for enforcement, there is a “grave risk that importers will still be surprised to learn that they are exposed to Uyghur forced labor,” the researchers said.
“In the meantime, however, it is no small thing that U.S. consumers and companies can be more confident that they are not selling or purchasing goods that perpetuate the oppression inflicted upon the people of the XUAR, and that their government is using the economic levers it has at its disposal to try to influence the PRC to change its treatment of the Uyghur people,” Murphy and Tate said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China. “While import bans may not be an immediate antidote to repression, Uyghur community groups are clear in their demand that a blunt instrument is required to make state-imposed forced labor less profitable for the government to sustain and is essential to any hope that Uyghur workers will be treated equitably in the future.”
