A watchdog group said the Dominican
company continued to violate labor standards after
President Trump lifted an import ban last year.
·
The
Trump administration lifted
a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) import ban on Central Romana, a major Dominican Republic sugar
producer, weeks after President Donald Trump returned to office.
·
CBP
had blocked Central Romana sugar imports in November 2022 under the Biden
administration after
identifying indicators of forced
labor
on the company’s plantations.
·
The
reversal has triggered allegations of political
interference,
particularly because Central Romana’s owners, the Fanjul family, have close political ties to Trump.
·
The
Fanjul Corporation contributed $1
million to a pro-Trump PAC
and $413,000
to the Republican National Committee
in 2024. Pepe Fanjul also reportedly hosted a $50 million Trump campaign fundraiser.
·
Trump
publicly praised Fanjul for his contributions at a White House dinner for
donors to the planned presidential ballroom, referring to Fanjul’s sugar
business.
·
Corporate
Accountability Lab (CAL) said
its investigations between 2023 and 2025 found that many of the labor problems underlying the 2022 CBP action remain unresolved.
·
CAL
conducted more
than 100 formal interviews
during five visits to Central Romana farms and worker housing.
·
Reported
continuing problems include:
o Poverty-level wages
o Excessive working hours
o Intimidation and threats by supervisors
o Poor and overcrowded company housing
o Lack of electricity and potable water
o Vulnerability of Haitian migrants and
Dominicans of Haitian descent
o Lack of retirement benefits for some
elderly workers
·
CAL
acknowledged some improvements during the import ban, including housing and latrine repairs,
electrification of some settlements and greater access to medical services, but said these measures were
insufficient.
·
A
planned February
28, 2025 briefing between CBP officials and CAL was cancelled one day before it
was scheduled. The
watchdog said subsequent efforts to reschedule were unsuccessful.
·
Two
weeks later, CBP modified the import order, allowing Central Romana to resume
shipments subject to certification within six months that it complied with
applicable labor standards.
·
CAL
described the reversal as “procedurally
irregular” and
said it found no evidence that Central Romana had completed the remediation
process previously recommended by CBP.
·
A
current U.S. official told The
New York Times that the manner in which the order was modified was
unusual and appeared political; another official said the decision came directly from the White House.
·
Normally,
CBP import bans related to forced labor remain until
companies demonstrate that their supply chains are free from forced labor through a comprehensive remediation and verification
process.
·
The
lifting of the Central Romana order is notable because the Trump administration
has simultaneously expanded
pressure on other countries and companies over forced-labor
practices,
including additional tariffs and restrictions on goods linked to forced labor.
·
Central
Romana denied
the allegations,
calling CAL’s report inaccurate and defamatory and stating that it continues to
improve working and living conditions in accordance with Dominican law and
international standards.
·
Central
Romana spent more
than $1.3 billion? No —
according to OpenSecrets tracking, it spent more than $1.3 million on lobbying
between early 2023 and the end of 2025,
hiring firms including Akin Gump, Barsa Strategies and Patino Brewster &
Partners.
·
The
lobbying firms employed former U.S. government officials, including former
Department of Homeland Security officials and a former U.S. ambassador to the
Dominican Republic.
·
After
the import restriction was lifted, all
three lobbying firms subsequently filed to terminate their lobbying
registrations for
Central Romana.
·
Dominican
civil-society groups continue to allege that forced labor
persists, while deportations of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican
Republic have reportedly intensified workers’ vulnerability and fear.
Trade-policy
significance: The
episode highlights a potential contradiction in U.S. trade enforcement—Washington is increasingly using tariffs
and import restrictions against foreign forced-labor
supply chains while questions are being raised about whether political
relationships influenced the removal of a forced-labor-related
restriction on a politically connected supplier.
Weeks after
President Trump began his second term, his administration quietly lifted a
measure that had blocked a major sugar producer in the Dominican Republic from
shipping its product to the United States over concerns about forced labor at the company’s plantations.
The owner of
the company, Central Romana, has cultivated close political ties to Mr. Trump,
donating to his 2024 campaign and his White House ballroom project. José
Fanjul, a Cuban American businessman known as Pepe, has hosted Mr. Trump at his
Fifth Avenue apartment and attended a state dinner at the White House welcoming
King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the United States.
The decision to
allow Central Romana to send sugar to the United States has raised inferences
of political interference, along with concern from labor
groups that have been monitoring working conditions on the company’s Dominican
farms.
On Tuesday, one
nonprofit watchdog group, the Corporate Accountability Lab, released a report
saying that many of the abusive conditions that led to the United States’
blocking sugar from Central Romana in 2022 had not been rectified.
The farm’s
workers, most of whom are of Haitian descent, are still laboring
under abusive working conditions, earning poverty wages, working excessive
overtime and facing intimidation and threats from their superiors, the group
said. The report added that workers live in dilapidated and overcrowded
company-owned housing, some of which lacks electricity and potable water.
Corporate
Accountability Lab is an independent nonprofit that describes its mission as
holding corporations legally accountable. The group carried out more than 100
formal interviews on Central Romana’s farms over the course of five visits in
the past several years, it said.
Charity
Ryerson, the watchdog group’s executive director, said that the group’s staff
members and investigators had regularly visited Central Romana’s farms and
worker housing between January 2023 and December 2025 and spoke with dozens of
workers in that time.
“What we saw
was depressingly familiar — more or less the same conditions that were present
when C.B.P. issued the withhold release order,” she said, referring to Customs
and Border Protection, which administers such import bans. “The small changes
we did see were largely superficial, and, importantly, didn’t address the
pervasive climate of fear among workers,” she added.
Central Romana
has denied accusations of any labor violations at its
farms, stating that the watchdog group’s report is “riddled with inaccuracies
and untruths.” In a response to questions from The New York Times, Jorge A.
Sturla Ferrer, a spokesman for Central Romana, said that presenting the
accusations as facts was “defamatory in nature.”
“Central Romana
continues to operate with the ongoing improvements for the working and living
conditions of our employees and their dependents, always committed with their
welfare in compliance with international regulations and in accordance with the
applicable laws of the Dominican Republic,” he said.
The White House
referred a request for comment to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which did
not respond to requests for comment.
Central Romana
is the largest sugar producer in the Dominican Republic. The firm is partly
owned by members of the Fanjul family, who also operate a conglomerate that
sells sugar under the Domino Sugar and C&H brands. Pepe Fanjul and his
brother Alfonso, who died this month, have been politically active for decades,
donating to both Democrats and Republicans.
In 2024, the
Fanjul Corporation gave a $1 million donation to Make America Great Again, a
political action committee supporting Mr. Trump, and $413,000 to the Republican
National Committee. It gave lesser contributions to Democrats. Pepe Fanjul also
hosted a $50 million fund-raiser for the Trump campaign in May 2024, The New
Yorker reported.
In October, at
a White House dinner for ballroom donors, Mr. Trump called out Mr. Fanjul’s
contributions.
“Pepe, you were
fantastic,” the president said. “He’s got a little sugar business. He has a
monopoly on the world’s sugar — I would say that’s a good business.”
“He’s been
great and a supporter right from the beginning for years,” he added.
The Trump
administration has recently taken aim at the forced labor
laws of other countries. In July, it issued tariffs on more than 80 countries
that it said did not adequately ban imports of goods made with forced labor.
The United
States has had a longstanding ban on imports of goods made with forced labor. The Trump administration has pushed other countries
to adopt such bans in its trade deals. Last month, it added 43 companies to a
list that bars goods suspected to be made with forced labor
in Xinjiang from the United States. But critics say the United States still has
shortfalls on its own labor protections.
Human rights
groups have long raised concerns about abuses in the Dominican sugar industry.
Many of the workers on Dominican sugar farms are Haitian migrants or Dominicans
of Haitian descent. Some do not have citizenship in the Dominican Republic or
in Haiti, making it difficult for them to leave and find other jobs.
In its research
at Central Romana farms, Corporate Accountability Lab said it found that these
stateless workers, as well as elderly workers who had not received retirement
benefits, were the most vulnerable to exploitation.
In November
2022, the Biden administration said that it had identified conditions of forced
labor on Central Romana’s plantations during an
investigation and blocked the company’s sugar from the United States.
That ignited a
fierce lobbying push from Central Romana, which spent more than $1.3 million on
lobbying from the beginning of 2023 through the end of 2025, according to
tracking from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit campaign finance group. The company
hired several well-connected lobbying firms, Akin Gump, Barsa Strategies and
Patino Brewster & Partners. Those firms employed former officials from the
Department of Homeland Security, which oversees C.B.P. and the import bans, as
well as a former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
One of Akin
Gump’s activities was filing Freedom of Information Act requests with Customs
and Border Protection and other agencies in the Biden administration to seek
information about the communications between government officials and Corporate
Accountability Lab and other groups working on labor
issues, the report said.
Corporate
Accountability Lab said that, while the import ban was in place from 2022 to
2025, it saw some limited improvements on the company’s farms, including some
repairs to housing and latrines. An electrification project also connected at
least one of the housing areas to the electrical grid, the report said.
The company
also took some steps to make health care more accessible in sugar cane fields,
including deploying a medical van to treat minor health issues.
But workers
interviewed by Corporate Accountability Lab on the topic described the services
as still inadequate. And the worker settlements that the group visited were
plagued with many of the same conditions, including a lack of electricity and
potable water and poor housing, the report said.
After Mr. Trump
came into office in January 2025, Corporate Accountability Lab said that
customs officials reached out to them to set up a briefing on their findings,
scheduled for Feb. 28, 2025. But the day before, the meeting was canceled, and the labor group’s
attempts to reschedule were ignored.
Two weeks
later, C.B.P. modified the import order against Central Romana. Though some
customs officials have said that the protocol for lifting an order is not well
defined, others said that it did not go through established processes.
Corporate
Accountability Lab said that the circumstances of the reversal were
“procedurally irregular and followed significant donations to the Trump
campaign.” The group also said it “saw no evidence” that the company engaged in
the type of remediation process that C.B.P. had previously recommended.
One current
official, who declined to be named for fear of retribution, told The Times that
the way the order was modified was unusual and that he believed the decision
was political. Another official said that the decision to lift the order came
to customs officials directly from the White House.
Such orders are
typically supposed to remain in effect until the importer produces proof that
its supply chain is free of forced labor, a process
that C.B.P. has said should involve a thorough review of its supply chains,
including engaging with workers and worker-led organizations.
But Central
Romana’s order was changed on the condition that it provide certification
within the next six months that it had complied with applicable labor standards, the report said. The customs agency did
not issue a news release about the change, as it had with some previous moves.
Kelly M. Fay
Rodríguez, who led global labor policy in the State
Department during the Biden administration, said that when she left government
in January 2025, shortly before the import ban was lifted, issues at Central
Romana persisted.
“I had hoped
that the company would pursue a strategy that would really meaningfully address
the threats that workers faced and the intimidation and exploitation that they
reported, but by the time I left, it had not been resolved,” she said.
In June, six
Dominican civil society organizations wrote an open letter arguing that forced labor continued on Central Romana’s farms. Since 2023, the
Dominican Republic has been carrying out a plan to deport thousands of people
of Haitian descent, worsening a climate of fear and dependency among farm
workers, the groups said.
In the months
after the lifting of the import ban, Patino Brewster, Barsa Strategies and Akin
Gump all filed to terminate their lobbying registrations.