In January, three police officers arrived at a warehouse in central Connecticut run by a company called UniUni, a logistics startup that handles millions of packages each week for mostly China-founded e-commerce clients like Temu, Shein and TikTok Shop. Inside, they found piles of cardboard boxes and plastic mailing bags in the brightly lit main room of the warehouse—everything you'd expect to see at one of the hubs that serve as the last stop for online orders before they're delivered to shoppers.

But in a pair of smaller rooms, the police found something unusual: about 10 ramshackle beds and air mattresses packed closely together, with bottles, clothes and bags strewn across the floor. A worker who had been sleeping in the room struggled to communicate with police because he only spoke Chinese, according to a police report.

Another man who identified himself as Kangning Tian, a supervisor for a UniUni delivery contractor, appeared to be living at the facility and sleeping on a bed made of cardboard boxes and duct tape. There was no shower in the warehouse, and the "extremely cluttered" sleeping rooms "had foul odors," according to the police report.