Jake Smith
Daily Caller News Foundation
Approximately 27% of tests run on shoes and clothing collected by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) in May found links to cotton produced by slave labor in China, according to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents obtained by Reuters.
CBP found that 10 of 37 garments collected tested to be “consistent” with cotton from the Xinjiang region in China, Reuters reported on Friday. The U.S. has banned imports from Xinjiang through the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act due to accusations that the Chinese government uses slave labor and tortures Uygher religious and ethnic minority in the region.
CBP has gathered three separate batches of clothing and shoes for testing since 2022, according to Reuters. Of the total collection, 13 out of 86 items were confirmed to be consistent with Xinjiang.
“The amount of Xinjiang cotton entering the U.S. should be zero,” Laura Murphy, a human rights and contemporary slavery professor at Sheffield Hallam University in England, told Reuters. “So, anything above zero percent should be a real warning.”
The results were confirmed through isotopic testing by an independent company, which can pinpoint the geographic origin of items such as cotton by assessing the material’s concentration of certain elements, according to Reuters. The FOIA document redacted specific information including the brands of the clothing and footwear tested.
A federal report last year found that approximately 87% of China’s production and 23% of international supply was sourced from cotton from Xinjiang between 2020 and 2021, according to Reuters. A number of major brands, including Ralph Lauren, Victoria’s Secret and Shein have hired independent testing companies to try and prevent their own products from containing cotton from Xinjiang.
One company, Nine Line Apparel, discovered that a number of their wholesaler’s products contained cotton from Xinjiang. The company’s CEO and Army CPT (ret.), Tyler Meritt, called on other clothing brands to start independently testing their goods.
“Americans would be horrified to discover that apparel they buy that sport religious or patriotic statements might have been manufactured by forced slave labor,” Merritt previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They may be unwittingly buying shirts which were made by imprisoned men and women being persecuted for their faith – all of which is being papered over with cheap prices.”
CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Today’s ruling elites champion policies every previous generation of Americans would have regarded as outright evil. At the top of that list would be the supremely radioactive issue – illuminated by the hit summer film “Sound of Freedom” – of the widespread trafficking and sexual slavery of children, as well as the shocking prevalence of pedophiles in the United States of America. Indeed, the U.S. is the largest market for child sexual abuse in the world.
According to Tim Ballard, who has led many missions rescuing sex-trafficked children around the world, the Biden administration actually ENABLES AND PROMOTES the trafficking and sexual slavery of children with its horrendous border policies, its push for early sexualization of children, championing children’s “right to consent” on everything including mutilating transgender surgeries, and so on.
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Ballard’s concerns are confirmed by Tara Lee Rodas, a Health and Human Services whistleblower who recently testified before Congress that under Joe Biden, “THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME THE MIDDLEMAN IN A LARGE-SCALE, MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR CHILD TRAFFICKING OPERATION.”
But that’s just the beginning. The whole, secret criminal mega-enterprise of child sex trafficking and the global elites’ affinity for pedophilia is exposed as never before in the August issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, in a groundbreaking issue titled “THE NEW AMERICAN SLAVE TRADE: How the Biden regime enables and promotes child sex trafficking in the U.S.A.” WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.
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