The forced-labor import list reaches gene sequencers, and the presumption now follows a company rather than a product

The Department of Homeland Security, acting for the interagency Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force, has placed three Shenzhen genomics companies on the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Entity List: Shenzhen BGI Technology Co., Ltd., known as BGI Group; its publicly traded testing unit, BGI Genomics Co., Ltd.; and MGI Tech Co., Ltd., the sequencer and reagent maker that shares BGI Group’s ultimate controlling shareholder^1,7. The update, published October 29, takes the list to 190 entities¹. Its interest as policy lies less in the names than in the ground for listing them. None of the three was listed for making goods in Xinjiang. The central finding is that they performed genetic testing with the Xinjiang government, and the statute converts that conduct into a presumption against every product the companies ship to the United States^1,3.

The instrument: a presumption attached to an entity

Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 has long denied entry to goods “mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part in any foreign country by convict labor or/and forced labor or/and indentured labor under penal sanctions”⁴. Under section 307 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) must build a case about particular goods. The UFLPA, signed December 23, 2021, reversed the burden for one region and for a defined set of companies³. Section 3(a) directs the CBP Commissioner to presume that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or “produced by an entity on a list required by clause (i), (ii), (iv) or (v) of section 2(d)(2)(B),” are prohibited under section 307 and “not entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States”³.

The four clauses describe different relationships to forced labor. Clause (i) covers entities in Xinjiang that make goods with forced labor; clause (iv) covers exporters of their products³. Clause (ii), the one used for all three companies, covers entities “working with the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor or receive forced labor or Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, or members of other persecuted groups” out of the region³. Clause (v) reaches facilities that source material from Xinjiang or from participants in the “poverty alleviation” or “pairing-assistance” programs³.

Clause (ii) does not ask what an entity makes. The task force’s stated basis for each listing is that the government “has reasonable cause to believe, based on specific and articulable information,” that the company conducts genetic testing in Xinjiang “alongside the government of the XUAR and as a part of its government initiatives,” and that such testing “is utilized to facilitate the recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring or receiving of forced labor”¹. For MGI the wording differs slightly: it “has provisioned genetic testing capacity to the XUAR government”¹. Once an entity is on the list, the presumption in section 3(a) attaches to everything it produces, whether or not that product has any link to the conduct that put it there³.

The exception is narrow by design. CBP may admit a good only if the importer has fully complied with the statute’s importer guidance, “completely and substantively responded” to every CBP request for information, and shown “by clear and convincing evidence” that the good was not made wholly or in part with forced labor³. Each exception must be reported to Congress and published within 30 days³.

The mechanism: what the October 29 update changes at entry

All three companies go on the clause (ii) list. BGI Genomics and BGI Group also go on the clause (v) list: BGI Genomics for testing that includes “genetic material of plants, animals, and bacterial diseases sourced from the XUAR,” and BGI Group for testing that includes “genetic material of human beings sourced from the XUAR”¹. MGI appears on clause (ii) only¹. Compliance staff screening by name should note that the notice gives BGI Group’s aliases as “BGI Group; and BGI Holdings” in one sub-list and “BGI Group; and BGI Genomics” in the other¹.

According to an analysis by the law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, CBP applies the presumption from October 29 to goods made wholly or in part by the three companies⁸. The firm describes two routes for a detained shipment. An applicability review asks CBP to find that the goods and their inputs were not made by a listed entity; an exception review concedes the link and seeks admission under section 3(b)⁸. Goods that CBP identifies as made by a listed entity are excluded without a detention stage, and a product from an unlisted supplier can still be held if it contains a listed company’s components⁸. The firm reports that importers generally have 30 days to respond to a detention, extendable to no more than 90 days, after which the goods are treated as excluded⁸.

The listing is a border measure. It does not reach sequencing services, data processing or joint research, which the Brownstein analysis notes fall outside the action⁸. Removal is possible: a listed entity may petition the task force chair, member agencies decide by majority vote, and the decision “is not appealable,” though a new request with new information will be considered¹.

The effect: laboratories as importers

Earlier listings fell mostly on industrial supply chains⁷. The statute itself names cotton, tomatoes and polysilicon as high-priority sectors³, and the August 3 update, which added 43 entities, ran heavily to aluminum, textile and agricultural processing firms, as Asia Times characterized it^2,7. The October entries fall on a different group of importers: laboratories, research institutions and drug developers that buy sequencing instruments, reagents, consumables and testing kits⁸. For goods the listed companies make themselves, the Brownstein analysis advises importers to “plan as though those goods are barred”⁸. Across the program, CBP has denied entry to more than 24,300 shipments valued at nearly $1 billion since June 21, 2022, as of July 31, according to the same analysis⁸.

The commercial stakes are contested. A Chinese columnist quoted by Asia Times cited a Huatai Securities estimate that Illumina has long held about 70 percent of the global sequencer market against 7 to 10 percent for MGI, and argued that the listing serves a market leader⁷. Asia Times also recalled that a Delaware jury found in May 2022 that Illumina had infringed two patents held by Complete Genomics, a BGI Group subsidiary, before the companies settled for $325 million⁷.

The parties’ positions are on the record. BGI Group said: “We firmly oppose all the allegations. BGI Group is not involved in any forced labor”⁷. It added that the listing would not materially affect its business⁷. A spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Commerce said, “There is no forced labor in China”⁷. Rep. John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, called BGI “China’s state-controlled DNA collection company and a national security threat to the American people”⁷. The task force did not make its underlying evidence public^1,7.

The longer view: from export controls to import exclusion

Washington’s concern with BGI’s work in Xinjiang is not new, but until now it ran through export controls. In July 2020 the Bureau of Industry and Security added two affiliates, Xinjiang Silk Road BGI and Beijing Liuhe BGI, to the Commerce Entity List, finding that they were “conducting genetic analyses used to further the repression of Muslim minority groups in the XUAR”⁵. In March 2023 it added BGI Research, BGI Tech Solutions (Hongkong) and Forensic Genomics International, citing a “significant risk” that their genetic data work contributes to state surveillance and a risk of diversion to China’s military programs⁶. Those rules required licenses for U.S. items going to the named affiliates^5,6. Neither named the three parent companies listed this week.

The two lists face opposite directions. The Commerce Entity List governs what U.S. exporters may send; the UFLPA list governs what U.S. importers may receive. Moving the BGI file from the first to the second changes who carries the compliance burden, from American suppliers of controlled items to American buyers of Chinese instruments. It also adds to a federal procurement measure: Asia Times reports that BGI and MGI are on the Pentagon’s 1260H list, which brings them within the BIOSECURE Act signed in December 2025 and its bar on federal contracts and grants⁷. The import presumption reaches private purchasers that the procurement law does not.

The clause (ii) theory also has a recent precedent on the same list. In August the task force used it against Zhengzhou Synear Food, a Henan dumpling maker, finding that it “works with the government of the XUAR to receive Uyghurs” and members of other minority groups from the region². The BGI listings extend the clause from receiving workers to testing them, a link the notice asserts but does not document¹.

What the instrument has not yet shown is whether its exception can work for a listed company’s own products. Section 3(c) requires CBP to publish each exception it grants³. For sequencers and reagents made by BGI and MGI, the first such report, if one comes, will be the test of whether the presumption is rebuttable in practice or only in statute.