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.

Kitty Bennett contributed research and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting.