After holding a hearing on Wednesday with three attorneys general discussing the impacts of the border crisis on states as part of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security’s process to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, committee members are holding another hearing on Thursday.
The committee’s Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability will examine how to improve the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA). The law was enacted to combat the abuse of the Uyghur Muslims enslaved in forced labor in the Xinjiang region of China by preventing the importation of goods from the region.
The hearing will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday and be led by Chairman Dan Bishop, R-NC.
It follows a hearing the subcommittee held last October, at which witnesses testified that DHS wasn’t enforcing the UFLPA and wasn’t preventing goods from being imported from the Xinjiang region of China into the United States.
“Congress passed the UFLPA two years ago with the intent of empowering robust enforcement against the importation of Chinese products produced with forced labor,” Bishop said. “However, enforcement of this law has been inconsistent at best, which has hurt America’s economic interests and allowed the unjust scourge of forced labor under the CCP to continue. In our last hearing on this topic, our witnesses detailed how products made with forced labor in China continue to enter the United States, as well as how the CCP’s exploitation of Uyghur forced labor undermines American manufacturers.”
Kimberly Glas, president and CEO of the National Council of Textile Organizations, testified that by not enforcing the law, Americans were also at risk.
“American manufacturers, and especially the American textile industry, competes against Chinese companies, the Chinese government and, unfortunately, our own government when we fail to effectively enforce our U.S. trade law,” she said.
“Who in our government would vote to allow China to ship billions each year, uninspected, duty-free to the United States? What a gift. Who would condone the packaging and exploiting of dangerous products to our marketplace, including products like fentanyl? Who would approve of the flooding of our market with subsidized products often made with forced labor? Yet that is the de facto policy of the U.S. government when we take a weak posture towards customs enforcement.”
The CCP is also bypassing U.S. trade laws, she and others testified. The CCP uses loopholes to bypass U.S. trade law, which if enforced, would result in products made by slave labor being flagged, they said.
An Amnesty International report found that the Chinese government was committing crimes against humanity. It details a systematic mass imprisonment organized by the CCP, as well as torture and persecution targeting Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang province. The BBC also reported on alleged coverup by the CCP, including its claim that the internment camps were “reeducation camps” created to teach those inside how to be Chinese. Human Rights Watch and other groups also pointed out that the camps were being used as part of the Chinese government’s “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism” begun in 2014.
According to the United Nations, roughly 1.5 million Uyghurs are in internment camps in Xinjiang province. In 2022, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report stating the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs “may constitute … crimes against humanity.”
Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told NPR Chinese oppression of the Uyghurs is “probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.”
Zenz also said Chinese policies of mass sterilization, forced abortions and mandatory birth control meet the United Nations definition of genocide.
