The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions against Chinese officials who are enforcing a policy of forced assimilation of Tibetan children, more than a million of whom have been separated from their families, UN experts said, AFP reported on Wednesday.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has announced that his country will no longer grant visas to Chinese leaders responsible for a system of boarding schools where young Tibetans separated from their families are forcibly sent.

The decision is part of a series of U.S. measures aimed at China, despite the recent resumption of high-level dialogue.

Beijing’s policy “is aimed at eradicating linguistic, cultural and religious traditions specific to Tibet among the younger generations of Tibetans,” Blinken said in a statement.

“We call on the Chinese authorities to stop the forced sending of Tibetan children to government boarding schools and to end the policy of forced assimilation in Tibet and other parts of China,” he said.

The decision will “seriously undermine relations” between the United States and China, said Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington.

Since 2021, the US has accused China of “genocide” against the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

American authorities, witnesses and human rights organizations claim that many representatives of this minority are subjected to forced labor and interned in camps.

The visa ban imposed on Tuesday will apply to former and current officials involved in China’s Tibet policy, a State Department spokesman said, without elaborating.

In his statement, Anthony Blinken cited the work of UN special rapporteurs who concluded in February that approximately one million Tibetan children had been separated from their families and forcibly assimilated in residential schools. According to these experts, the program appears to be designed to forcibly integrate young Tibetans into the majority Han culture. In boarding schools, they are forced to learn Chinese and do not learn Tibetan language, history and culture.

The International Campaign for Tibet, an association close to Tibetan spiritual and religious leader the Dalai Lama, welcomed the US sanctions against the “unbelievable” separation of families. The boarding school policy is aimed at “turning Tibetans into Chinese” to “strengthen the Chinese government’s control over Tibet,” association president Tencho Gyatso said.

In April, other UN experts accused China of forcing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans into “vocational training” programs that threaten Tibetan identity and could lead to forced labor. China’s foreign minister said the report was baseless.

Tibet has been ruled by China with an iron fist since the 1950s. Many exiled Tibetans accuse Beijing of repression and torture and say it seeks to destroy their culture.