Lawmakers demand DHS briefing on forced labor enforcement as Labubu dolls draw scrutiny

A bipartisan letter from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is pressing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to accelerate enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and expand the UFLPA Entity List of companies barred from shipping goods into the United States. Shared first with Fox News Digital, the letter asks DHS and Customs and Border Protection to address 10 specific concerns, among them a New York Times report alleging that the cotton in Pop Mart's Labubu dolls traces back to Uyghur forced labor in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

DHS added 43 companies to the Entity List in July. Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California and ranking member on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, credited the administration for that action but told Fox News Digital the agency had done nothing on the list for roughly a year beforehand. Khanna put the current total at 44 designated companies and said the committee wants more added.

The case Khanna is making runs through supply chain economics. He told Fox News Digital that goods produced with slave labor, including steel, aluminum, textiles, and silicon-carbon materials, enter the U.S. market at prices domestic manufacturers cannot match, naming US Steel and Cleveland Cliffs as companies exposed to that pressure. He also described the evasion route the committee is asking DHS to close: Chinese producers route finished goods through factories in Malaysia or Vietnam, obscuring the origin of the underlying inputs. The committee's position is that if forced Uyghur labor is at the source, the import block should apply regardless of where final assembly occurred.

The letter is signed by four Republicans and four Democrats, addressed to Mullin. The UFLPA, enacted in 2021, directed DHS's Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force to develop a strategy for stopping goods manufactured with forced labor in China. Khanna described the enforcement push as simultaneously an economic, national security, and human rights issue, a framing echoed by the letter's eight signatories spanning both parties.

Fox News Digital contacted DHS, CBP, the Chinese Embassy in the United States, and Pop Mart for comment. The next development to watch is DHS's formal written response to the committee's 10 questions.