FR Notice on UFLPA Entity List Expected Shortly

The Entity List released last month for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) will be getting longer fairly soon, according to John Pickel, principal director, trade and economic competitiveness, Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans at DHS. Pickel, speaking at a CBP trade conference in California July 18, sad, "The process for adding and removing entities will be summarized in a Federal Register notice that we expect to come out in the short term."

Eric Choy, executive director of trade remedy law enforcement, said during the same session that CBP, ahead of implementation, focused on how enforcement of UFLPA would affect the flow of trade, and looked at "how we will be able to temper that, balance that enforcement with our facilitation, our trade facilitation mission and our ports of entry."

Choy said trade professionals have a lot of questions about the shorter timeline to get evidence to CBP after a UFLPA detention compared to the period under withhold release orders. "It's really incumbent upon the importers that due diligence must occur well in advance if importers are waiting for detentions in order to conduct that due diligence that at the time of detention, then whether it's 30 days or 90 days, it just won't matter. And so, so ultimately, there is going to be some discretion that the agency will be able to ... may ... it may exercise on a case-by-case basis with regards to the timelines, but a lot of that will depend on the importer and the process and the case by which we're considering."

The panelists received several questions about how many detentions there had been in the first 27 days of the law's coming into effect, and of what products. They avoided answering all of them, and said they're not sure how much data they will make public about UFLPA enforcement.

"We want to make sure that the information that we're providing externally cannot be inferred back to specific importations and to specific companies," Choy said. In response to one of the questions, he said: "I think the more important question is what haven't we seen? He said there was trepidation among the trade that UFLPA would worsen backlogs at the ports. But CBP carefully designed a risk-based approach, he said, and that has not happened.

He said there are articles that say there have been redeliveries of shipments, but "it's just not true. We have not requested redeliveries of any shipments. We have not seized any products."

There have been Xinjiang-related requests for redelivery (see 2207130065), but those came under the polysilicon WRO, not since UFLPA came into effect.

All Choy would say in terms of what has happened under UFLPA is that there have been detentions, and there have been goods exported because they fell under UFLPA.

One of the questions to the panel was if Xinjiang-related goods made by a U.S. firm but exported to Japan or Canada would come under the jurisdiction of UFLPA. They would not, Choy said: you must import into the U.S. to be subject to the restriction.

The panel was asked when CBP would choose to seize goods rather than detain them. Choy said if they see a pattern of the same goods coming to the U.S. when previous shipments were detained, that could lead to a seizure, and so could transshipment.

"Observing and watching how the supply chains react, how the market reacts and how evasion may be occurring and where supply chains shift based upon CBP's enforcement, and all those things will inform this dynamic process and the way ahead by which we enforce," Choy said.

One questioner said a company they know did an audit of a product's supply chain, and it produced 11,000 documents. That person questioned whether CBP has the resources to handle this sort of supply chain documentation.

Choy did not directly answer the question; instead he suggested it was an argument against enforcing UFLPA back to raw materials. "Too hard to document is not an adequate excuse," he said. He said if businesses want to avoid forced labor risk, maybe they should do business outside China's Xinjiang region.