The Trump administration has taken a novel approach as it looks for ways to issue new tariffs to replace the levies invalidated by the Supreme Court. It began a new trade investigation in March that targets 59 countries and the European Union with potential tariffs unless they pass laws that ban imports of goods made with forced labor.
In two days of hearings about the investigation in Washington this week, human rights officials and company executives generally praised the move, saying it was likely to bring about a major expansion of global legislation to combat forced labor. But they also expressed a variety of cautionary messages, saying that the administration must ensure that other countries actually enforce any new laws and that the efforts don’t backfire.
Some who testified argued that the additional tariffs the Trump administration has proposed could tax the resources that foreign governments need to police labor violations, or hurt vulnerable foreign workers rather than help them by cutting off trade with the United States.
Others argued that forced labor occurs in fields, factories and fishing vessels, and that import bans could risk missing where labor violations were actually occurring.
Trade experts have applauded the administration’s focus on forced labor, but also questioned its motivation. The investigation targets all of the country’s major trading partners — including Canada and the European Union, which have the most forward-leaning laws on forced labor outside of the United States. And it excludes some smaller countries where the U.S. government has identified slavery, human trafficking or forced labor, like Afghanistan, Belarus, Burma and Mauritania.
Some are questioning whether the administration’s measure is more of a pretext to impose tariffs that U.S. officials want to have in effect anyway, and whether foreign countries will be able to take actions to have the tariffs rolled back.
Annick Febrey, the co-founder of the Better Trade Collective, a consulting firm focused on ethical supply chains, said at the hearing that import bans would be helpful but what would matter most is if other countries actually had an “operational system” to fight forced labor. Even if some countries pass legislation to ban certain imports, they may lack the infrastructure to detain suspect goods, the government coordination to act on what they find or the political will to follow through in punishing guilty firms, she said.
Legislation matters “but it can’t be the only measure,” she said.
The hearings come as the Trump administration prepares to issue new tariffs to replace those struck down by the Supreme Court in February. After the Supreme Court decision, President Trump imposed a 10 percent global tariff on all imports, but that measure is set to expire in July without congressional reauthorization.
To replace it, the Trump administration has initiated two trade investigations under a legal provision called Section 301. One is related to forced labor import bans and the other to what the administration calls excess manufacturing capacity. Hearings for the trade investigation on excess capacity are set to be held in Washington next week.
Given the support of Democrats and civil society groups for measures to improve labor conditions, the Trump administration’s tariffs on forced labor laws may prove more politically durable than other approaches.
Samir Goswami, who directs the forced labor program at Global Rights Compliance, an international law foundation, acknowledged that the Trump administration may have other political reasons for targeting forced labor, but he argued that the measure was still beneficial.
“If the impact is we are able to stop the import of forced labor goods at the border, we are able to press our trading partners to have bans so that no goods made with forced labor come into global markets, I think it’s a positive thing,” he said.
Kush Desai, a spokesman for the White House, said that foreign forced labor was not only a humanitarian concern but “a potent threat to American workers and industries.”
“The Trump administration’s historic Section 301 investigation will ensure both that the perpetrators of forced labor practices cannot unduly profit from unfettered access to the American economy and that American workers are no longer unfairly undermined,” he said.
In the hearings this week, groups representing footwear and technology companies said tariffs should be narrowly targeted. Otherwise, they said, the tariffs risk increasing costs for consumers and inviting retaliation from trading partners.
Mihir Torsekar, an economist at the Coalition for Prosperous America, argued that forced labor operates as a “hidden production subsidy,” making foreign products cheaper than American-made ones and undercutting legitimate U.S. businesses.
Others urged the United States to do a better job of enforcing its own rules against imports of goods made with forced labor, including a 2021 law that bans most products from Xinjiang, a far western region of China. The 2021 law established a blacklist of companies whose supply chains have been found to involve forced labor, but no new entities have been added to that list since the Biden administration.
Some forced labor experts said the Trump administration had been reluctant to take on the issue for fear of disrupting relations with China. Washington and Beijing engaged in a disruptive trade spat last year after Mr. Trump imposed harsh tariffs on Chinese exports, and China responded by restricting exports of minerals that are needed by a variety of American manufacturers.
“I am concerned that the U.S. government may be going soft on forced labor enforcement because they’re being cautious about China,” said Laura Murphy, a former Biden administration official who helped to enforce the U.S. ban. She said it was “no secret” that enforcement of the ban on forced labor goods had weakened under Mr. Trump.
The United States has more advanced laws on forced labor than any other country. The United States has a nearly century-old ban on imports made with forced, convict or indentured labor, as well as the 2021 law restricting imports from Xinjiang.
Most other countries do not police their imports for such labor violations. Canada and Mexico have adopted forced labor import bans as part of the terms of U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, while the European Union has issued a ban on products found to be made with forced labor that will become fully enforceable next year.
Even when a country passes legislation, making sure it is actually enforced is a much more difficult task. In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of the customs bureau, has been focused on enforcing the Trump administration’s changes to immigration policy.
Some experts say imports of banned goods remain widespread. An investigation by The New York Times last month found that some Labubus — a viral doll made by a Chinese company — contained cotton from Xinjiang.
Brett Tipple, the chief scientist and president of a testing company called FloraTrace, which tests coffee and other food products to determine their origin, said that his recent test of various brands of paprika plucked from U.S. store shelves found that all of the products were from China, with 60 percent of them coming from Xinjiang. This was despite many brands being labeled “made in USA,” he said.
“This is a pretty well-known issue in the industry,” he said, adding that the government was “not really doing enough with what they have in place already.”
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that the United States was the global leader in combating forced labor and that it continued to give priority to enforcement of forced labor laws. In its fiscal year 2025, the bureau stopped about 954 shipments per month, compared with 944 on average in the previous year, while total shipments stopped have also increased, she said.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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