Did Chinese Slave Laborers Lose out to Biden’s ‘Clean Energy’ Agenda?

Administration’s ‘National Climate Advisor’ pressured Homeland Security to okay solar panels made with slave labor.

Can “clean energy” come from tainted solar panels? At least one part of the Biden-Harris administration seems to have thought so, and seems to have tried to get the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cease enforcing laws against importing Chinese solar products made by “forced labor.”

Through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) has obtained the official calendar and email communications of DHS Secretary Mayorkas. On September 27, 2021, Secretary Mayorkas received a briefing preparatory to meeting the next day with Biden National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy. “NCA McCarthy will likely discuss the concerns the solar industry has regarding the Department’s enforcement posture on solar products, particularly with regard to Hoshine Silicon Products Company, Ltd. (Hoshine),” the briefing read. 

DHS had on June 24, 2021, issued a Withhold Release Order (WRO), instructing “personnel at all U.S. ports of entry to immediately begin to detain shipments containing silica-based products made by Hoshine and its subsidiaries.” Why? Hoshine Silicon is based in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and relies on the forced labor of minority Uyghurs in manufacturing. The U.S., Mayorkas said at the time, “will not tolerate modern-day slavery in our supply chains.”

Admirable, but apparently inconvenient for the president’s clean energy push. The briefing materials for the Mayorkas-McCarthy meeting said that “She will also raise potential options that could provide relief to the industry.” McCarthy was worried about “the detention of goods and their effect on consumer and investor confidence in solar products, projects, and the industry; concern is growing that this will affect the industry’s ability to meet the nation’s clean energy goals.” 

The pressure to ease up on Hoshine was coming from outside the administration as well: On October 5 Mayorkas met with representatives of American Clean Power, an industry association. They had “concerns regarding DHS’s enforcement posture on solar … particularly Hoshine Silicon Products Company.” Despite DHS’s finding of forced labor, the “Industry contends that current enforcement actions will lead to significant job losses, harm the solar industry for years to come, and impede the Administration’s climate goals.” 

The Uyghurs could not be reached for comment. As a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris Energy Department made clear to the Washington Free Beacon in 2022, ethics takes a back seat to the administration’s environmental agenda.

“It seems like the Biden-Harris administration was willing to sacrifice more than ethical probity to get its clean power agenda through,” said PPT Director Michael Chamberlain. “China is an authoritarian regime. Its government-sanctioned use of Uyghurs and other ethnic and political prisoners is well-documented. China is also a bellicose geopolitical rival. DHS made a rational and moral judgment about Hoshine products, and within months other parts of the administration are trying to get it to reverse itself. Yet another example where policy agendas trumped ethics in the Biden-Harris administration.”

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