What UFLPA’s Latest Numbers Say About Apparel and Textiles Enforcement
U.S. authorities have detained more than 1,090 apparel, textile and footwear shipments worth more than $46 million since the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) went into effect in June 2022, newly released statistics from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ending in November reveal.
Of these, some 570 shipments, worth $13 million, were subsequently denied entry into the United States, while nearly 340 of them, valued at $27 million, were released. Roughly 180, worth $6 million, are currently pending.
More from Sourcing Journal
Fashion goods, which make up 17 percent of the shipments reviewed by CBP to date, make up the second-most scrutinized category after electronics, which saw more than 2,930 shipments tarry at the ports. Industry and manufacturing are a close third, with more than 1,080 detained shipments.
Most of the freight originated from two countries. China, with more than 590 held shipments, valued at $20 million, made up almost 55 percent of the cargo inspected. Of these, 324, worth $2 million, were given the no-go. Vietnam followed with 387 shipments worth $20 million, amounting to 35 percent of the tagged goods. Ultimately, more than 220 of the shipments, valued at $10 million—a figure five times that of rejected Chinese cargo—were barred from entering the country.
The UFLPA, which was signed into law by President Biden in December 2022, imposes a rebuttable presumption that all goods made in whole or in part in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are the result of forced labor and therefore inadmissible to the United States.
Since the law was enacted, an Entity List of companies linked to the repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities has grown to 30. They include businesses outside of Xinjiang that have been fingered for participating in state-sponsored labor transfer programs, which Beijing insists is part of poverty alleviation efforts but human rights experts say are a way to isolate and indoctrinate swaths of the mostly Muslim population under highly surveilled conditions. Firms trafficking in cotton, a priority category for enforcement, have also been joined by companies involved in the production of wool, cashmere and other textile products, suggesting that a wider net is being cast.
At the U.S. Fashion Industry Association’s Apparel Importers Trade & Transportation Conference in New York in November, Robert Silvers, undersecretary of strategy, policy and plans at the Department of Homeland Security, called enforcement an “iterative, ongoing process.”
“It’s kind of like cleaning and painting a cruise ship,” he said. “You keep moving onto the next part; you keep touching it up because supply chains are shifting, companies select different vendors, vendors recalibrate what they’re making [and] where they’re sourcing from. And we’re constantly getting market intelligence, we’re constantly getting new technology that we can use to do our work, and industry, likewise, is experimenting, in a very good way, with technologies also, giving it more power to make smart choices about supply chains and getting more certainty for itself.