August 20,2026

Wyden Questions Customs and Border Protection Over Favorable Treatment of Dominican Corporation’s Sugar Imports Despite Clear Evidence of Ongoing Forced Labor

Wyden Letter Follows New Report Alleging Forced Labor and Abuse of Workers Continues at Central Romana Sugar Plantations Owned by Close Trump Ally and Donor

Washington, D.C. –Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, questioned why the Trump Administration allowed Central Romana, a Dominican sugar producer that was notorious for abusive conditions and violating workers rights, to resume sugar imports into the United States last year, in a letter to the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Wyden’s questions follow a new report by the Corporate Accountability Lab, a nonprofit that interviewed scores of workers at Central Romana in the Dominican Republic. Central Romana’s owner, José Francisco “Pepe” Fanjul, has donated more than $1 million to Trump and the Republican party, and he hosted a fundraiser that raised more than $50 million for 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 Trump took office in 2025, that decision was reversed, and Central Romana was allowed to resume exporting sugar to the United States.

“Circumventing standard trade enforcement processes for politically connected, billionaire-owned corporations undermines the integrity of U.S. trade policy. 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,” Wyden wrote to CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott. “And this failure to fully enforce Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (Section 307) 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.” 

Wyden is seeking 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, among other information.

The full letter and list of questions are available here.

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