Forced Labor Enforcement in Dominican Republic Questioned

[ABS News Service/21.08.2026]

Senate Finance Committee ranking Democrat Ron Wyden (Ore) is asking why the Administration allowed Central Romana, a Dominican sugar producer with a record of abusive conditions and worker rights violations, to resume sugar imports last year.

In a letter to Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott, the senator noted that the company’s owner, José Francisco “Pepe” Fanjul, has donated more than $1 million to the President and the Republican party, and he hosted a fundraiser that raised more than $50 million for Mr. Trump.

The United States blocked Central Romana’s sugar imports in 2022 based on forced labor conditions at Central Romana’s operations in the Dominican Republic, including abusive working and living conditions and withholding of wages. Shortly after Mr. Trump took office in 2025, that decision was reversed, without following proper procedures and Central Romana was allowed to resume exporting sugar to the United States, the senator said.

“Circumventing standard trade enforcement processes for politically connected,

billionaire-owned corporations undermines the integrity of US trade policy,” the senator wrote. “It places law-abiding American agricultural businesses and workers at a distinct competitive disadvantage while facilitating ongoing, egregious human rights abuses against stateless and vulnerable workers abroad.”

The Administration’s failure to enforce trade law “only serves to highlight the hypocrisy in the

Administration’s recent imposition of tariffs on over eighty countries under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, purportedly due to those countries’ failure to enforce an equivalent import ban on forced labor goods.”

Sen. Wyden said he wants complete CBP records related to the irregular modification of CBP’s 2022 Withhold Release Order on Central Romana, as well as all contemporaneous communications regarding Central Romana between CBP and the White House and the State Department.