Late last week, 10 bipartisan members of the House Ways & Means Committee wrote to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Acting Commissioner Troy Miller urging him to increase efforts to block imports made in Xinjiang Province, China potentially with forced labor.

The House Ways & Means Committee has jurisdiction in the House over trade matters. The letter comes after complaints by the solar industry as well as a comment by an executive at JA Solar in China that Chinese-made solar products are being treated differently at different U.S. Ports of entry.

The lawmakers are urging CBP to “pursue a more comprehensive [Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA)] enforcement strategy to keep products tainted by forced labor out of the supply chains of goods imported into the U.S.”

The late 2021 UFLPA establishes a rebuttable presumption at U.S. law that goods made in Xinjiang or by entities listed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as employing forced labor are presumed to have been made by forced labor and thus denied entry into commerce in the United States. DHS updated its entities list in August.

In response to JA Solar’s complaint of the disparate treatment of its products at U.S. ports, the Ways & Means Committee lawmakers minced no words in their letter to CBP: “This is unacceptable, particularly if it suggests that some ports are not providing appropriate scrutiny to fully implement the UFLPA. We cannot give JA Solar or any company a free pass to import goods tainted with forced labor into the U.S.”

The lawmakers are also urging CBP to enhance its coordination with stakeholders (including Congress) as well as for the Administration to update the entity list more frequently.

The lawmakers also promised to authorize sufficient funding for the CBP to carry out its mission in policing banned products.

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