WASHINGTON — Members of Congress sent a letter on Wednesday to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross pressing him to impose limits on the sale of certain technologies by American companies to Chinese companies or agencies. The lawmakers argued that Chinese security forces might use the technologies for overbearing surveillance and other human rights abuses.

The two signers of the letter, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, wrote that their concerns were “particularly acute” in relation to technologies used by security forces that are maintaining surveillance and mass internment camp systems on Muslim minorities in the northwest region of Xinjiang.

The Chinese government and the Communist Party have been building large internment camps in the vast borderland region to control the population of ethnic Uighurs, Turkic speakers who mostly practice Sunni Islam, and other Muslim groups, including Kazakhs. Western experts who have analyzed the camps say they hold up to one million people. Human rights advocates and legal scholars say that what Chinese officials are doing amounts to the worst human rights abuse in China in decades.

In recent months, China has come under growing international criticism for the system, and prominent news organizations have done investigative reports on the camps, including The New York Times.