launch an investigation into the reported mass detention of Uyghurs in political re-education camps in Xinjiang. On 26 July 2018, Vice President of the United States Mike Pence raised the re-education camps issue at Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. He said that "Sadly, as we speak as well, Beijing is holding hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uyghur Muslims in so-called 're-education camps', where they're forced to endure around-the-clock political indoctrination and to denounce their religious beliefs and their cultural identity as the goal." On 26 July 2018, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, an independent agency of the U.S. government which monitors human rights and rule of law developments in the People's Republic of China, released a report that said as many as a million people are or have been detained in what are being called "political re-education" centers, the largest mass incarceration of an ethnic minority population in the world today. On 27 July 2018, The U.S. Embassy & Consulate in China released Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom Statement on China, which mentioned the detention of hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in "political re-education camps", and called the Chinese government to release immediately all those arbitrarily detained. On 28 August 2018, U.S. senator Marco Rubio and 16 other members of Congress urged the United States to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act against Chinese officials who are responsible for human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, they called for the sanctions on Chen Quanguo who is the current Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang (the highest post in an administrative unit of China) and six other Chinese officials and two businesses that make surveillance equipment in Xinjiang. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for his refusal to condemn the Chinese government's repressions against the Uyghurs. On 3 May 2019, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver condemns the detention of Uyghurs as concentration camps. On 11 September 2019, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act. On 3 December 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a stronger version of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act by a vote of 407 to 1. The bill was signed into