From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Nick Pope

Then-national climate adviser Gina McCarthy appears to have met directly with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2021 to urge him to ease up on a Chinese solar company linked to slave labor, according to documents obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust, a government watchdog group.

A pre-meeting primer prepared for Mayorkas by staff to get him ready to meet with McCarthy in June 2021 states that McCarthy would “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.” The meeting, which McCarthy requested, was scheduled to take place several days after DHS issued a “Withhold Release Order” (WRO) to customs officials to begin seizing shipments of Hoshine solar products because of its connections to slave labor in China’s Xinjiang region, an area known as ground zero for the Chinese government’s genocidal repression of Uyghur Muslims.

DHS still lists Hoshine Silicon Industry and its subsidiaries as entities manufacturing products that use slave labor in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

“The impacts of the Hoshine Withold (sic) Release Order (WRO) include 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 primer for Mayorkas reads.

PPT Documents – Hoshine + DHS by Nick Pope

“Industry indicates that the Hoshine WRO limits their ability to meet demand for solar panels without liability,” the memo continues. “Industry expressed that the WRO’s impact on consumer and investor confidence has resulted in cancelled orders and investments and has put jobs at risk.”

Chinese companies dominate the global supply chains for green energy products including solar panels, and a large share of the world’s polysilicon — a key ingredient for the production of solar panels — comes from the Xinjiang region specifically, The New York Times reported in June 2021 following the announcement of the Hoshine WRO. The Hoshine WRO illustrates a wider problem for the Biden administration whereby it works to cut China and Chinese slave labor-tied companies out of the U.S. solar supply chain without going too far and suffocating American solar companies that rely on Chinese component parts at the expense of the government’s lofty long-term green energy goals.

For example, about one year after the scheduled Mayorkas-McCarthy meeting, the Biden administration opted to waive tariffs on Chinese solar products in June 2022 amid concerns that the levies could crush the American solar industry before reinstating the duties in June 2024. Some American solar firms and executives said that Chinese companies managed to undercut U.S. solar production during the period of time when the tariffs were not being enforced.

Mayorkas stated publicly that “the United States will not tolerate modern-day slavery in our supply chains” on the day DHS announced the WRO against Hoshine.

The memo briefed Mayorkas on several options that McCarthy was likely to bring up at the meeting, including possible proposals to phase in enforcement to reassure the spooked market, increase transparency for the public with respect to DHS’ Hoshine restrictions or to create a “de minimis” threshold for the amount of slave labor-linked polysilicon in a given imported product. Mayorkas’ staff also laid out detailed “pros” and “cons” for each of the suggestions they expected McCarthy to make in the meeting.

“DHS made a rational and moral judgement about products from a company and a nation that uses the forced labor of Uyghurs and other ethnic and political prisoners,” Michael Chamberlain, executive director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But it seems human rights are a secondary consideration for the people charged with implementing the Biden administration’s green agenda and their counterparts in the clean energy industry. It’s hard to see what’s ‘clean’ about solar panels made with slave labor.”

McCarthy, who was the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the Obama administration, served as the Biden administration’s national climate adviser before leaving the government in 2022. In between her stints in the Obama and Biden administrations, McCarthy worked as the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a major environmental activist group that has a presence in China and is registered with or supervised by Chinese government institutions like the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau and the State Forestry and Grassland Administration, according to NRDC’s Chinese language website.

Notably, the documents obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust also include a similar briefing memo meant to prepare him for an October 2021 meeting with the American Clean Power Association about DHS’ enforcement actions against slave labor-linked solar products. That particular document spells out how representatives for the green energy trade group were likely to push for answers about the administration’s conflicting goals of rooting out slave labor from solar supply chains and quickly standing up a robust domestic solar industry.

DHS and McCarthy’s spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF.