For nearly all her career, Thea Lee has focused on defeating new free-trade agreements, arguing that pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement and efforts by the U.S. to ease China’s entry into the World Trade Organization undermined workers in the United States. From 1997 to 2017, she was the lead trade policy official at the AFL-CIO and later became deputy chief of staff there. From 2018 to 2021, she was president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive Washington D.C. think tank supported by labor union funding. In 2021, President Biden named her deputy undersecretary of labor for international labor affairs — essentially the department’s top labor diplomat. She oversees the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, which puts pressure on nations to end forced labor and child labor. Along with Customs and Border Patrol, she plays an important role in enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which seeks to end imports from the Xinjiang region of