WROs May Become Politicized Under Trump, Human Rights Lawyer Predicts

Charity Ryerson, executive director and founder of the Corporate Accountability Lab, told International Trade Today in an interview that "there is strong evidence that the Trump administration is using regulatory processes to benefit their friends and to punish their enemies." Civil society organizations like hers "want nothing to do with discriminatory enforcement of the law."

In March, the Trump administration modified a WRO on Dominican sugar company Central Romana, allowing it to export to the U.S. after the owners donated money to Republican organizations (see 2503190071). Ryerson said she doesn't expect that "CBP will act quickly to reinstate the WRO on DR sugar, despite evidence we have uncovered about the insufficiency of remediation" of forced labor practices. Her organization is "suspending the filing of petitions at some government agencies" for the time being, she said.

The Trump administration's approach to forced labor enforcement has necessitated a change of strategy from NGOs fighting such practices, Ryerson said. Her group is "trying to get a sense of which statutory tools" remain effective and where "you're just going to hit up against a wall." That becomes particularly challenging when the Trump administration, "in channeling its political interests, is willing to be of assistance" to U.S. companies with forced labor in their supply chains, she said. Finding which companies the administration considers friends may be as simple as tracking their political activities, "recognizing that those who make donations and attend candlelight dinners appear to be getting favorable treatment from this administration."

Instead of pursing regulatory action against these companies, some of which are "pretty big wrongdoers," Ryerson said her organization may pivot to litigation. "Where there are litigation opportunities, I think that we're going to look a little bit more in that direction than we had been."

Ryerson said CBP is currently streamlining its internal processes in the forced labor division, and "it's possible that we're actually going to start to see substantially more WROs" issued under the Trump administration. These "won't necessarily be effective action in response to the worst forced labor cases," because the Trump administration "will continue to channel its political interests," but there may be times when, "like quantum entanglement," the interests of the administration and CBP's forced labor division "find the right resonance for the issuance of WROs." That may mean some companies using forced labor "may well find themselves in the crosshairs," she added.

The discriminatory nature of WRO application means that NGOs may be disincentivized from bringing regulatory action against companies using forced labor if they are competing in the same market as "friends of the [Trump] administration," Ryerson said. Her group has another petition pending against a Dominican sugar company but isn't providing additional information in the case because "we think that it would be just like a gift to Central Romana for there to be a WRO against" a competitor. "It's the strangest thing" to see a punishment for a human rights abuser "not actually creating the kind of justice for workers that we're looking for," she said.

In an Aug. 21 webinar hosted by Human Rights First, Ryerson worried that other companies targeted by WROs may look to the Trump administration's actions on forced labor and decide that "it's much cheaper for them to make political donations to Trump and his [political action committees] and to the [Republican] party than it is to actually remediate long-standing, complex forced labor." She said that when her organization recognizes "where there might be a political donor or a friendship or something else that could influence the process" of WRO issuance, it won't "spend a lot of time doing on the ground investigation and then providing data to this government on those cases."

As WROs become politicized and "administrative agencies are no longer trustworthy," Ryerson said the only option left is to "sue them in the courts." While she would prefer to employ regulatory action, "so you don't just have to sue companies when they do wrong, but when those are taken away, I think that's kind of what we have."

Ryerson said that when the Trump administration determined that the WRO on Central Romana "was no longer politically expedient," it reportedly sent "someone from the White House and someone very high up at the State Department" to CBP's forced labor division and "told them that they needed to modify it immediately, regardless of the fact that there had not been any remediation." When members of the forced labor division balked, "people's jobs were threatened." She also said there were "false allegations made against my organization to undermine the credibility of the investigations and the evidence that we put forward" in the Central Romana case.

The State Department, CBP and the White House didn't comment.