CBP Uyghur Enforcement Picks Up

Our friends at Sandler Travis & Rosenberg report CBP is now detaining PVC products such as vinyl flooring under the UFLPA and asking importers to trace these items back to their originating chemicals such as chlorine, carbon, and ethylene. 

While the UFLPA specifies tomatoes, cotton and polysilicon as high‑priority sectors for UFLPA enforcement, according to detention notices CBP issues with regard to potentially violative goods, PVC has been added as a sector of concern after aluminum was added in October 2022.

A June 2022 report published by UK’s Sherffield Hallam University and Maine’s Materials Research notes that the top export application for China-originating PVC is luxury vinyl floor coverings. PVC flooring resins made in China are present in more than one-quarter of all flooring sold in the U.S.

• The two largest PVC manufacturers in China are both state-owned enterprises based in the XUAR
• All of the Uyghur Region’s PVC companies have been active participants in the XUAR’s notorious labour transfer programs.

Those companies export to 73 intermediary manufacturers, who then export PVC-based building materials to at least 158 companies worldwide.    Brands selling flooring at very high risk of Xinjiang inputs include Home Legend for Home Depot, Armstrong, Mannington Mills, Mohawk, Lumber Liquidators, Congoleum, and many others.

CBP Outreach Efforts

CBP is undertaking multiple efforts to provide more information for companies seeking to comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (19 U.S.C. 1307).

• On February 23, 2023, CBP released additional guidance on enforcement and review procedures under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act: 
• More detailed FAQs
• Best Practices for Applicability Reviews
• Guidance on Executive Summaries and a Sample Table of Contents

• On March 14-15, 2023, CBP’s Office of Trade will host the Forced Labor Technical Expo in Washington D.C. The Forced Labor Technical Expo will offer a forum for industry to provide the international trade community with information about the latest technologies that can aid in securing and managing the flow of goods. Register here.

ACE Updates for UFLPA 

On March 18, 2023, CBP will deploy the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Region Alert enhancement to the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE). This enhancement will provide an early notification to importers and their representative of goods that may have been produced in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang or XUAR) and may be excluded from importation into the United States. This enhancement includes electronic data interchange (EDI) impacts.

The UFLPA was signed into law on December 23, 2021 (Public Law 117-78) and implemented on June 21, 2022. It supports U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) forced labor enforcement authorities and establishes a rebuttable presumption that all goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in the Xinjiang region of the People’s Republic of China, or by entities identified by the United States government on a UFLPA entities list, are prohibited from entry in the United States.

What will change for trade users?

The UFLPA Region Alert will add three new validations to ACE in specific applications. The validations will be:

• Postal code will be a required field.
• Users will receive an error message if the postal code provided is not a valid Chinese postal code.
• Users will receive a warning message when a XUAR region postal code is provided.

Importers may request an exception to the rebuttable presumption from CBP during a detention, after an exclusion, or during the seizure process as described in the UFLPA Operational Guidance for Importers