The Trump administration is taking “final action” at the direction of the president to impose new tariffs on 60 global economies over their failures to impose and enforce bans on imports made with forced labor.
The freshly minted import taxes, which represent a large building block in the federal government’s effort to reconstruct its tariff-driven trade regime, will cover over 99 percent of imports into the United States market starting on Friday.
Levied under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the tariffs are the result of investigations launched in May by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The probes included two public hearings and the USTR accepted over 2,100 public comments from concerned parties and industry stakeholders before announcing its decision to move forward with the duties on Thursday.
Ranging from 10 percent to 12.5 percent, the tariffs will impact prominent apparel and textile sourcing locales like China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam, as well as prominent trading partners like the European Union and the United Kingdom.
The USTR’s federal register notice clarifies that the tariffs will apply to all products from the designated economies except those specifically named. The notice makes mention of textiles 427 times, indicating exemptions across a number of categories and countries.
The notice also proposes a “textile mechanism” which would allow a certain volume of apparel and textiles from specific economies—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia—to enter the U.S. at reduced tariff rates. These tariff-rate quotas, which will have an initial duration of three years, were designed to “reduce reliance on inputs from other sources that are more likely to contain forced labor inputs,” USTR wrote.
The focus on textiles is notable given that cotton apparel and fabrics are particularly vulnerable to forced labor allegations. China has been heavily targeted by the U.S. government with charges of forced labor specifically related to cotton, resulting in the enactment of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in June 2022. China’s continued influence on the Southeast Asian supply chain is undeniable, and it remains a key source of inputs for fashion products.
“President Trump recognizes that decades of moral suasion have not eradicated forced labor from global supply chains. The United States has had a forced labor import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,” USTR Ambassador Jamieson Greer said in a statement announcing the duties.
“Today’s action will begin to correct what is both a human rights abuse and distortive trade practice to improve the welfare of workers everywhere. I am encouraged by the trading partners who have moved quickly to adopt forced labor import prohibitions, and look forward to ensuring their effective enforcement.”
The Washington, D.C.-based National Council of Textile Organizations, which represents American fabric mills and other players across the textile supply chain, was dismayed by the USTR’s inclusion of the so-called textile mechanism.
NCTO president and CEO Kim Glas told Sourcing Journal characterized the decision as “baffling,” saying, “it’s counterintuitive to what the administration is hoping to achieve on forced labor.”
“If you want to really help our U.S. cotton farmers and our Western Hemisphere textile supply chains, you would be doubling down on making sure that [they are] fully advantaged, and incentivizing brands and retailers to source more here,” she said.
Glas submitted public comments to the USTR and testified on behalf of U.S. textile manufacturers during the Section 301 hearings, pointing out that such a mechanism would facilitate the foreign sourcing of textiles “at a time when our industry has lost 41 plants.” Asia’s textile market share has grown in the U.S., she said, from 77 percent in 2019 to 79 percent in 2026, while the Western Hemisphere’s share has fallen from 16 percent to 12 percent during the same period.
“The removal of Section 301 duties on apparel imports from Asian countries is just going to accelerate these alarming trends,” she said. “We’ve seen a lot of the countries that were named for a tariff-rate quota have double-digit growth since President Trump put tariffs in place, and this comes at expense of USMCA and CAFTA-DR qualified [countries],” she added.
The USTR’s textile mechanism, as announced Thursday, is also incomplete—missing definitions of exactly which textile products will be exempted from tariffs and which will not. “They’re basically saying that given the volume of comments they received, they will further define this at a later point,” Glas explained. “Obviously, we’re going to continue making our concerns known, and we want to work with the administration on an alternative approach.”
This article has been updated to include commentary from Kim Glas of the National Council of Textile Organizations.
