CBP Working on Revealing More Info During UFLPA Applicability Reviews

Tasha Reid Hippolyte, DHS deputy assistant secretary for trade and economic competitiveness, said she's in constant conversation with UFLPA's Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force, which compiles the entity list, and DHS' general counsel on whether FLETF can release the Chinese-language names of entity list firms, or their addresses. She said the easiest request to fulfill, "the one that I'm pushing," is to provide the Chinese-language names of companies that have been added to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act's entity list.

"I can't promise you that will happen," she said during the U.S. Fashion Industry Association conference, but she thinks it probably will.

Apparel was a Uyghur forced labor enforcement priority even before UFLPA passed, and Hoxie said it remains a priority "because there's so much cotton [that] comes out of the Xinjiang region."

When apparel importers have cargo detained, they expect CBP suspects the garment contains cotton harvested in Xinjiang, but they don't know which firm triggered that suspicion -- a fabric mill, a cotton broker, a thread mill. Hoxie said that if one of their companies asks for an applicability review after a detention, "one of the things that we're actively working on is making sure that we can give you as much information as we can. Now, we can't tell you, 'It's this company XYZ,' but we can tell you that it's in this particular area of the supply chain, that's where we're seeing some risk." He said part of that process is providing guidance from his office to the centers of excellence about how they can respond to questions during an applicability review.

Hoxie said the apparel industry has gotten better at being able to document its supply chain so that they can prove there is no connection to Xinjiang or entity list firms, and therefore, get cargo released, but he wants to continue to hear from industry players about what aspects of UFLPA implementation are difficult for the industry to manage.

One of the areas industry stakeholders feel will be very difficult to manage is documenting where the cotton in used clothing came from when that used clothing is later recycled into new garments.

"I implement the law, I don't make the law," Hoxie told an audience member who asked about whether goods made from post-consumer waste would be expected to have the same supply chain tracing as new garments. "We've really gone over the law as much as we can, and there's no exception for recycled materials. And so that's the guidance we've been given from the legal department." He said apparel isn't the only industry struggling with this -- aluminum is also a priority sector in UFLPA, and Hoxie noted "aluminum is heavily recycled."

Although Hoxie could offer no flexibility there, he emphasized that CBP wants to communicate information that will help companies prove their goods are not linked to Uyghur labor. "We've always maintained that the whole point of forced labor [enforcement] is not to prohibit trade. It's to encourage ethical trade. So we want to make sure that we open up these trade routes again, with different [supplier] companies, and making sure that people are compliant."

Hoxie said CBP had just posted guidance about isotopic testing. While the agency will accept any test, following the guidance on providing details about the service provider's methods, confidence interval and chain of custody of the sample (including pictures of the garment and how it relates to the shipment items) will make the result more useful for CBP.

Hoxie said CBP is asked all the time, "Is a cotton test good enough to get a release of cargo?" He said: "No."

He said importers also ask: "Hey, will you do a test for me?" after a detention. The answer to that is also no. The guidance says: "Even with these additional investments [in new labs], CBP will have limited testing resources and does not have the capacity to test all U.S. imports."

One area where the forced labor team a few months ago pulled back the curtain a little is by posting Attachment 2-B, the document that importers receive if cargo is detained under UFLPA. "We just posted it because there's a lot of information in there," he said, including some of what the Apparel, Footwear and Textiles center is looking for in applicability review packets.

The CBP panel touched on the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee. Felicia Pullam, Office of Trade Relations executive director, said that the agency is working on finishing appointments for COAC vacancies. Hoxie said CBP has been working with the COAC to update importer guidance for UFLPA.

Although UFLPA dominates industry attention on forced labor, the withhold release order activity that preceded UFLPA has not ended.

Hoxie said, "We're going to be ramping up our withhold release orders and findings investigations."

In a Q&A, Hoxie was asked whether CBP was really enforcing the WRO on cotton from Turkmenistan. He said CBP doesn't see a lot of shipments of apparel containing that cotton, but said, "We have had detentions." He said he couldn't say how many. Hoxie also said CBP would not be creating a public WRO detention dashboard, as it has with UFLPA.

The UFLPA dashboard may add new details over time, Hoxie said, such as mode of transportation, or possibly, where reexports are going. But he said it will never provide tariff codes at the level of detail that would be helpful to the garment industry, because if they got down to the product level, "it starts getting into our law-enforcement sensitive targeting, and showing where we're looking and where we're not looking."

He said it's possible that at some point, perhaps when more goods have been detained, CBP would disclose down to the four-digit level, rather than just the chapters in the tariff code.