Over the course of President Donald Trumps trade war with China, the United Nations confirmed that Beijing has placed over 1 million Muslims in internment camps, The New York Times revealed that Chinese authorities are running the first artificial intelligence-powered effort to track minority citizens on the basis of race, and Chinese officials shifted from denying mass detention and surveillance to publicizing it as a wise response to terror.

Trade negotiations now appear to have collapsed, and instead of signing a deal as he was expected to this month, Trump is bludgeoning Beijing with fresh passion increasing tariffs he already imposed on over $200 billion worth of Chinese products and publicly listing other exports his administration might soon target. Weve been treated unfairly for many, many decades, the president said on Tuesday. But amid his many remarks about resetting the U.S.-China relationship, Trump has yet to comment on the countrys nightmarish high-tech human rights crisis or to directly use American influence to pressure Chinese officials responsible for abuses.

While others in the Trump administration, from Vice President Mike Pence to State Department and Pentagon officials, have slammed the crackdown, the silence from the top and the lack of real action during the trade talks signals that the worst repression in China since the brutal Cultural Revolution isnt central to U.S. dealings with Beijing.

Thats a choice with a real cost in human suffering. Delaying measures that could force a winding-down of the policy perpetuates Chinas sense of impunity, lawmakers and activists say, and millions more people remain vulnerable to being spirited away into camps; the U.S. estimate of detainees is already more than double that confirmed by the U.N. back in September, at nearly 3 million. And its evidence that as Trump taps bipartisan frustration with how Washington has previously handled Chinas relations with the U.S., encouraging an economic bond responsible for massive job losses stateside, hes ignoring the fundamental miscalculation: the bet that China would ultimately adopt American-style norms about trade, fair business practices and, crucially, human rights.

To treat the trade dispute as separate from Beijings latest and most advanced authoritarian experiment to suggest that it can be solved first and those pesky moral questions can be tackled afterward is to rely on a Band-Aid as U.S. policy instead of attempting a reckoning that really makes strategic and moral sense.

If China can keep the U.S. silent at this point it has already won, said Rushan Abbas of the group Campaign for Uighurs.

Abbas told HuffPost her sister went missing on Sept. 11, 2018, in what she perceives as retaliation for Abbas public criticism of China abroad. She believes her sister is in one of the camps. She initially expected a serious U.S. response to the crisis because of Trumps talk of taking on China, but now worries that wont be possible if he doesnt tie a reduction in his tariffs on Chinese exports, which she calls leverage, to some kind of promise by Beijing to rein in its persecution.

The administration is already legally bound to punish Chinese officials using new human rights sanctions authority that Congress created in 2016, according to Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Trump has used those powers in dozens of other cases, and last month Menendez led a bipartisan group of close to 50 lawmakers in a letter chiding cabinet members for the administrations failure so far to use them on China.

The Chinese government needs to understand that there will be serious consequences if they continue this brutal campaign of repression. At the same time, the Trump administration must make up its mind about upholding Americas values and whether they can be disposed of as a negotiating tactic for a trade deal, Menendez wrote in an email to HuffPost.

Advocates arent suggesting the global economic pain of the trade war should continue until the last camp closes. But they note that Trump could take a range of steps to show that the U.S. sees tackling Chinas growing oppressiveness as vital to recalibrating the way the two countries interact. He could publicly endorse U.N. calls for independent inspections of the camps, rally American allies to present a united front against the detentions and address their general skepticism of his China policy or follow his announcement of expanded tariffs with one of targeted sanctions. Most of his rivals in the 2020 Democratic field have already said they see rights concerns as important in negotiations with Beijing even as they agree with some elements of his approach for now, the president is an outlier.

Chinas communist party has for decades mistreated Muslim minority citizens, particularly members of the 10-million-strong Uighur ethnic group, as potential threats to national cohesion and stability. Following ethnic riots in 2009 and terror attacks, notably in 2013, Beijing committed to mass suppression, relying on policies like banning many Islamic names , placing security checkpoints every few yards in Muslim-heavy areas and assigning officials to live in families homes, all the while echoing Western fear-mongering about Islam. Since 2017, soon after an official named Chen Quanguo took over the northwestern region known as Xinjiang that has historically been home to the Uighurs and other Muslim communities like Kazakhs, China has used mass incarceration as its preferred tactic. Rights groups say detainees are subjected to ideological indoctrination and brutal treatment that has left some attempting suicide, and some camps are now sites of forced labor.

The Trump administrations choices so far havent inspired a lot of confidence that it will try to help the detainees. On April 12, Politico revealed that the White House surprised the State Department by blocking human rights lawyer Gay McDougall one of the experts whose confirmation of the figure of 1 million Uighur detainees in August sparked an international firestorm from being renominated to a top U.N. committee. In December, Trump was expected to announce human rights sanctions, according to Foreign Policy , after his aides led activists to believe they would be coming.

Trump aides now suggest the trade war could even stretch into 2020 as part of his reelection strategy, according to Axios . If the idea is to hold off on an ultimate decision about using punitive sanctions for Chinas treatment of the Uighurs until an economic deal is reached, it could break either way, said Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch. Theres the risk that the euphoria of a honeymoon period and Trumps desire to show voters he got concessions from China will cause even more prevarication.

The main U.S. push presently is rhetorical. Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both publicly condemned the Chinese policy and administration officials have repeatedly highlighted it, including in a special session they staged in March on the sidelines of the U.N. Human Rights Council a notable step, given that Trump has pulled the U.S. from the body itself. The crisis shocks the conscience and truly has mobilized our foreign affairs apparatus, Louisa Greve of the Uyghur Human Rights Project said.

Richardson believes unapologetic public advocacy is key and has worked with Beijing before when U.S. criticism helped spur the release of feminist activists in 2015 and when German advocacy helped end the house arrest of Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobos widow.

But given that the Trump administration has the expanded sanctions power available, that China appears to feel ready to make some concessions and that the president himself is a poor beacon for moral leadership, activists want more.

Trumps own individual credibility on these matters is at best suspect ... thats why something like sanctions that has real and lasting consequences are much more effective it raises the price both for individuals and for the government they represent for their conduct, Richardson said. Until China pays an actual price for what it is doing in Xinjiang, its simply not going to stop.

With China angering the human rights community by ramping up efforts to justify its policy as an altruistic campaign of job training despite the fact that many detainees are, like Abbas medical doctor sister, already qualified along with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and a traditional deadline for announcing sanctions approaching in June, policymakers are going to keep hearing arguments like that. Itll be hard for them to square arguments for caution, rooted in economics or anything else, with the gigantic stakes that the Uighurs supporters plan to continue highlighting.

Chinas going to use mass surveillance and its police state for far more than whats happening in the concentration camps, Abbas said. What the Uighur people are facing today is beyond freedom of speech or freedom of expression or freedom of religion. Now its about crimes against humanity and its about the right to life. What Chinas doing challenges basic integrity, democracy and the freedom of the world.