More Action Is Needed to Combat Forced Labor From China
This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times on May 15, 2024
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.
Read the full op-ed in the Epoch Times here.