For many months, the Trump administration neglected to add any new names of Chinese firms suspected of using forced labor in the Chinese region of Xinjiang to the relevant entity list. Recently, though, around the same time that the administration proposed a new round of tariffs geared to penalizing trading partners which make no attempt to bar goods made with forced labor, it also added forty new names to the list of firms which may not export goods to the United States because of concerns about slave labor.
Politico headlines the news thus: “Trump hit countries with tariffs over forced labor, while slowing enforcement of its own ban.” It sounds as if the slowing of enforcement occurred at the same time as the announcing of the new tariffs.
Yet Politico acknowledges that the administration has just added forty new companies to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List. Which Politico takes credit for (July 31, 2026).
President Donald Trump’s latest wave of tariffs are based on allegations that other countries aren’t doing enough to combat forced labor. At the same time [emphasis], his administration has quietly pulled back enforcement of a U.S. ban on goods made with Chinese forced labor as it tries to maintain a trade truce with Beijing.
In the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, his administration did not add any new companies to a trade blacklist for businesses that source goods from the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has detained more than a million Uyghurs and other minorities in a campaign the U.S. government has called genocide. The blacklist, which was mandated under a 2021 law and is overseen by multiple agencies, presumes goods from Xinjiang are made by people coerced or forced to work against their will, and bars those items from entering the United States.
After Politico published this report for subscribers, the Department of Homeland Security issued an update adding more than 40 new Chinese companies to the blacklist [emphasis added], effective Aug. 3…
The value of goods held up at the border over suspicion they were made wholly or partly in Xinjiang has also plummeted under Trump—from $1.76 billion in fiscal year 2024 to $166 million in fiscal 2025, according to data from Customs and Border Protection….
The freeze means the government has stopped publicly identifying new companies it suspects of sourcing from Xinjiang [emphasis added]—in at least one instance shelving a batch of firms its own task force had already approved for the blacklist, according to two former officials, including one who worked on trade during the second Trump administration….
One U.S. official, granted anonymity because [he or she was] not authorized to speak publicly, said the lower number and value of parcels stopped at the border reflect stronger deterrence, not weaker enforcement, arguing that importers have cleaned up their supply chains and that fewer detentions mean the law is working.
Two things are being talked about here, the entity list itself and what’s happening to goods at the border.
Maybe the article is based on older reporting that has not been properly updated. Politico deserves credit for publicizing the second Trump administration’s failure, until now, to add new Chinese companies to the blacklist. The administration may have acted in response to Politico’s reporting. But it’s the new additions to the entity list that are happening “at the same time as” the latest wave of tariffs.
Whether the U.S. will now enforce the ban on imports of slave-made goods shipped by listed companies as vigorously as it should be enforced is another question. The president seems to zigzag between resisting the Chinese Communist Party and appeasing it.
