Experts: UFLPA 'Strongest' Forced Labor Law but Still Needs Work
Workers' rights activists during a panel discussion this week praised the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act but warned that enforcement is slowing under the Trump administration.
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Laura Murphy, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Human Rights Initiative, said during a CSIS webinar this week that CBP’s enforcement of UFLPA “has plummeted in the last year.” She noted that CBP detained 1,900 shipments in January of this year alone but from March to October detained only another 1,900 in total. Even so, she said the UFLPA remains effective when the agency chooses to use it. “It’s the UFLPA that made [international corporations] change their supply chains,” she said, adding that while the law won't alter Beijing’s policies toward Uyghurs, it has imposed costs significant enough to make "the Chinese government have to think twice.”
Jewher Ilham, forced labor project manager at the Worker Rights Consortium, called the UFLPA “the strongest piece of pro-worker legislation” passed by Congress in four decades, but she said U.S. enforcement tools are lagging. The Entity List contains 144 companies, unchanged since January 2025, despite “hundreds, probably thousands” of submissions last year. Ilham pointed to additional high-risk sectors -- baby formula, gold, nickel, magnesium -- that have yet to receive priority status. She called for a "reconsideration" of CBP's "permissive" reexport policy for detained shipments, pointing to the 45% rate of detained shipments that were reexported, a practice she called “very concerning.”
Anasuya Syam of the Human Trafficking Legal Center called for an expansion of access to Customs data, saying that most successful enforcement actions “would not have happened but for civil society” using ocean shipping data. She urged CBP to expand transparency across all modes of transport.
Former Department of Labor official Thea Lee said trade laws remain “the single most effective external pressure” available but questioned whether the administration is signaling sufficient resolve. Companies are "constantly testing the will and the commitment” of the U.S. government for UFLPA enforcement, she said. Weakening enforcement, paired with strained international cooperation, risks sending a message that companies can "take the risk" of sourcing from Xinjiang, she warned.