Scoop: Congress and DHS increase pressure on Temu

Temu, the e-commerce giant, is facing scrutiny for its “reprehensible” record on forced labor, including investigations by the Biden administration into Temu for its reliance on slave labor from China’s Xinjiang province.

One longtime intelligence agency veteran confirmed to the Washington Reporter that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking into the Chinese-tied retailer. “I know DHS is looking deeply into Temu,” he said. The company “pays the law lip service,” but their products “could not not be from Xinjiang province,” he said. Under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), spearheaded by Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), DHS must block imports that use Uyghur slave labor by adding manufacturers, exporters, and other violators to the UFLPA entity list. 

Rubio has hammered Temu, along with a Singaporean-based retailer called Shein. And Rubio is far from alone, with lawmakers like Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.), one of the top Republicans on the House’s Education and Workforce Committee, also said to the Reporter that Temu’s cheap products directly undermines the American workforce, and that the company’s use of slave labor is “even reaching the American workforce’s ability to compete fairly.”

Late last year, the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to Temu’s parent company out of concern for what Walberg described as “data privacy and security risks associated with Temu and its record of horrific human rights abuses.” In the letter, Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wa.) and Gus Bilirakis (R., Fla.) said that “China may be able to exploit lax data security practices or backdoors to access user information, much like the concerns we have raised regarding TikTok.”

 Jacob Helberg, a member of theU.S.-China Commission, told the Reporter that Temu’s business practices are harmful to both China’s Uyghur population and to American storefronts. 

“Temu has built an empire on exploiting the de minimis loophole, which allows them to avoid any import duties and any scrutiny into their supply chains,” Helberg said “They’re competing against every mom and pop shop in the country, just without the taxes and the legal scrutiny that applies to everyone else…it’s past time for Congress to come together and close this loophole to level the playing field for American businesses and ensure no American is unwittingly complicit in the purchase of goods made with forced labor.”

In addition to the Congressional scrutiny, Arkansas’s attorney general, Tim Griffin, recently announced a lawsuit against Temu for “deceiving Arkansans [and] illegally accessing their personal information.” Mike Lucci, who recently founded State Armor, an organization dedicated to combating communist China, told the Reporter that forced labor is “common under China’s communist government,” and that the Temu “platform allows Beijing to intercept sensitive and private information about American consumers.”

With an increased bipartisan focus on China’s aggression, Hill staff expect substantial more oversight of Temu from both the House and the Senate, and regardless of who wins the presidential race, there will be heightened scrutiny of Temu.