Chen’s case mobilized a grassroots advocacy community of involved Chinese language-Americans, who raised consciousness about her expertise, lobbied members of Congress on her behalf, and raised cash for her authorized protection. One in every of these teams would later change into APA Justice, one of the crucial vocal and constant voices towards the China Initiative and racial profiling.
When information broke that Chinese language-American teachers had been once more being investigated and terminated underneath suspicion of espionage in 2019, the networks initially created to help Chen reactivated.
For a lot of observers, the parallels had been clear. “With the China Initiative, we have now seen a number of failed and weak prosecutions. Ms. Chen is definitely not alone in that regard,” Ashley Gorski, a senior workers lawyer with the ACLU Nationwide Safety Undertaking, which helped symbolize Chen, informed MIT Know-how Overview.
Chen was arrested in 2014 and charged with espionage by the FBI, which alleged that she illegally accessed a authorities database to share delicate details about American dams with Chinese language scientists. Additional investigation revealed that what Chen had truly executed was use a shared password, broadly identified inside her workplace, to entry a database for her work. The dearth of proof led the Justice Division to drop its costs 5 months after submitting them. Nonetheless, Chen was fired from her job—for a similar now-discredited causes that led to the FBI costs.
The defective info got here from the Commerce Division’s Investigations and Risk Administration Service (ITMS), an inner safety unit {that a} July 2021 Senate investigation discovered had engaged in broad patterns of unfounded, discriminatory investigations geared toward Chinese language-American and different staff—and which named Chen’s case for instance of misconduct. ITMS was disbanded shortly after the report was printed.
Within the meantime, Chen filed a wrongful termination grievance to the Advantage Methods Safety Board, a quasi-judicial physique that oversees employment circumstances involving federal staff, and received. However the Commerce Division, which oversees the Nationwide Climate Service, appealed. Personnel shortages on the MSPB left the attraction in limbo for years, so in 2019, Chen filed a civil go well with towards america authorities for malicious prosecution and false arrest. Her authorized workforce sought $5 million in damages.
