Hair weaves from Chinese prison camps seized

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in New York announced Wednesday they had seized a shipment of weaves and other beauty accessories suspected to be made out of human hair taken from people locked inside a Chinese internment camp.To get more news about weave hair, you can visit monahair.com official website.

The shipment of almost 13 tons of hair products worth more than $800,000 bore signs of “potential human right abuses of forced child labor and imprisonment,” the agency said in a release. The violations included “use of prison labor” and “additional situations of forced labor, including, but not limited to, excessive overtime, withholding of wages, and the restriction of movement,” according to Customs officials.
“The production of these goods constitutes a very serious human rights violation, and the detention order is intended to send a clear and direct message to all entities seeking to do business with the United States that illicit and inhumane practices will not be tolerated in U.S. supply chains,” said Brenda Smith, Executive Assistant Commissioner of the CBP Office of Trade.

Rushan Abbas, a Uighur American activist whose sister went missing in China almost two years ago and is believed to be locked in a detention camp, said women who use hair weaves should think about who might be making them.

“This is so heartbreaking for us,” she said. “I want people to think about the slavery people are experiencing today. My sister is sitting somewhere being forced to make what, hairpieces?”

News of the horrific shipment emerged one month after former National Security Advisor John Bolton revealed in a memoir that President Trump told China President Xi Jinping last year that Uighur concentration camps were “exactly the right thing to do.”

Amid a furor over that account, Trump signed the bipartisan Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, condemning “gross human rights violations of specified ethnic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region in China.”

The massive shipment was made by Lop County Meixin Hair Product Co. Ltd. Customs made a similar seizure from a different Chinese company in May, though that was of synthetic hair.Both of the exporters are in China’s far west Xinjiang region, where over the past four years the government has detained an estimated 1 million or more ethnic Turkic minorities.

The ethnic minorities are held in internment camps and prisons where they are subjected to ideological discipline, forced to denounce their religion and language and physically abused. China has long suspected the Uighurs, who are mostly Muslim, of harboring separatist tendencies because of their distinct culture, language and religion.The Associated Press tried to visit Hetian Haolin Hair Accessories Co. more than a year ago during an investigation into forced labor inside the camps. But police called the cab driver taking AP journalists to the area, ordering the driver to turn back and warning that the cab’s coordinates were being tracked.

From the road, it was clear the factory — topped with “Haolin Hair Accessories” in big red letters — was ringed with barbed wire fencing and surveillance cameras, and the entrance was blocked by helmeted police. Across the street, what appeared to be an educational facility was topped with political slogans declaring “the country has power” and urging people to obey the Communist Party. It was unclear whether the factory was part of a detention center, but former detainees in other parts of Xinjiang have described being shuttled to work in fenced, guarded compounds during the day and taken back to internment camps at night.