US officials have seized a shipment of beauty products made from human hair that are suspected of being manufactured by forced labour in Chinese internment camps.

Authorities told The Associated Press that 13 tons (11.8 metric tonnes) of hair products worth an estimated £638,000 were in the shipment.

“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 US supply chains,” said Brenda Smith, executive assistant commissioner of CBP’s Office of Trade.

Authorities have not said whether the hair was taken from inmates but survivors of the prisons have described having their heads shaved upon being detained. 

It is the second time this year that CBP has slapped one of its rare detention orders on shipments of hair weaves from China, based on suspicions that people making them face human rights abuses. The orders are used to hold shipping containers at the US ports of entry until the agency can investigate claims of wrongdoing.

Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur American activist whose sister, a doctor, 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, hair pieces?”

Wednesday’s shipment was made by Lop County Meixin Hair Product Co Ltd. In May, a similar detention was placed on Hetian Haolin Hair Accessories Co Ltd, although those weaves were synthetic, not human, the agency said.

Hetian Haolin’s products were imported by Os Hair in Duluth, Georgia, and I&I Hair in Dallas. I&I’s weaves are sold under the Innocence brand to salons and individuals around the US.

Both of the exporters are in China’s far west Xinjiang region, where, over the past four years, the government has detained an estimated one million or more from ethnic Turkic minorities.

They 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 Uyghurs, who are mostly Muslim, of harbouring separatist tendencies because of their distinct culture, language and religion.

Reports by the AP and other news organisations have repeatedly found that people inside the internment camps and prisons, which activists call “black factories,” are making sportswear and other apparel for popular US brands.

The AP tried to visit Hetian Haolin Hair Accessories Co. more than a year ago during an investigation into forced labour 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 centre, 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.

The Chinese Ministry of Affairs has said there is no forced labour, nor detention of ethnic minorities.

“We hope that certain people in the United States can take off their tinted glasses, correctly understand and objectively and rationally view normal economic and trade cooperation between Chinese and American enterprises,” the ministry said in a statement.

Last December, Xinjiang authorities announced that the camps had closed and all the detainees had “graduated”, a claim difficult to corroborate independently given tight surveillance and restrictions on reporting in the region. Some Uyghurs and Kazakhs have told the AP that their relatives have been released, but many others say their loved ones remain in detention, were sentenced to prison or transferred to forced labor in factories.

While tariffs and embargoes over political issues are fairly common, it’s extremely rare for the US government to block imports produced by forced labour.

The 1930 Tariff Act prohibited those imports, but the government has only enforced the law 54 times in the past 90 years. Most of those bans, 75%, blocked goods from China, and enforcement has ramped up since Barack Obama strengthened the law in 2016.

On June 17, Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, condemning “gross human rights violations of specified ethnic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region in China”.

Earlier, calling for its passage, house speaker Nancy Pelosi decried what she described as China’s mass incarceration, forced sterilisation and journalist suppression.

“Beijing’s barbarous actions targeting the Uyghur people are an outrage to the collective conscience of the world,” she said in a statement.