Biden administration adding dozens of Chinese firms to forced-labor blacklist

The Biden administration added more than two dozen Chinese companies to its forced labor blacklist Friday in its latest effort to combat the exploitation of China's ethnic Uyghur population.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) identified 29 businesses allegedly using forced Uyghur labor in the country’s Xinjiang province to produce goods for industries ranging from agriculture and pharmaceutics to bioscience.

President Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLP), legislation that aims to punish China for its abuses against ethnic and religious minorities in the region, into law in 2021.

“Forced labor is a violation of basic human rights,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. "The Department of Homeland Security has aggressively enforced the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, preventing goods made through forced labor from entering our country, investigating and exposing more than 100 bad actors, and helping American businesses avoid inadvertently profiting from this modern form of slavery."

“Alongside our government, industry, and civil society partners, the United States is making progress towards the eradication of forced labor while supporting economic fairness, safeguarding human rights, and holding perpetrators accountable," he added.

Mayorkas also shared that the agency was identifying new measures to prevent the import of goods produced as a byproduct of forced labor amid feedback on their swift approach to blocking products from entering the U.S.

“We get competing arguments about what we are doing — some will say we’re slow, and we certainly have heard from some businesses that we are too aggressive and moving too quickly,” Mayorkas said Friday in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s sometimes very difficult to get the granularity in the supply chain, but we have made incredible strides in our investigative capabilities, and we are looking at harnessing, increasingly, technology to assist us in that," he told the outlet.

DHS announced additional bans to three companies in late September and two more in early October.