WASHINGTON- The red dates looked innocuous enough, sold alongside other ingredients for soups and herbal dishes on the shelves of Asian supermarkets in sprawling strip malls less than an hour’s drive from the White House.

But they were not supposed to have been there at all. The dates, which came from China’s Xinjiang region, had skirted a United States law banning products from there that are linked to forced labour, according to a report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project advocacy group in August.