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A Chinese human rights lawyer has been arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raising concerns he could be deported to China where he would face persecution.
Wu Shaoping fled China at the end of 2019 amid a crackdown on human rights lawyers. He travelled to the US on a tourist visa and made an asylum claim in 2020, for which he is still awaiting a decision.
In the US, he found work as an Amazon courier while remaining active in China’s embattled human rights community.
On Wednesday, Wu was stopped by ICE officers the Mount Holly Springs borough in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, while delivering parcels.
According to an account relayed through Shi Minglei, a friend who spoke to him in detention on Thursday, ICE officers asked Wu to provide proof of his citizenship. Wu presented proof of his pending asylum application and explained that he had entered the country legally.
However, ICE agents arrested him and took him to a detention facility in Pennsylvania. The facility and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an immediate request for comment outside of US working hours.
Human rights groups have also raised concerns about Bai Zhaodong, a Chinese investigative journalist detained in Thailand. The Chinese foreign ministry confirmed to Reuters this week that China had submitted an extradition request for Bai, saying he is suspected of extortion and bribery by a non-public servant.
Wu started his career as a commercial lawyer but later became involved in human rights circles as a loose collective of scholars, lawyers and activists interested in political and legal reform emerged in the 2010s.
He took on sensitive cases involving religious minorities and political dissidents, the type of work that has resulted in many lawyers disbarred or harassed.
“He hoped that Chinese people could enjoy freedom and democracy, and did not like the way that China’s authoritarian system oppressed the common people,” said Wu’s wife, Li Caoliu, who lives in the US with him.
In December 2019, Wu attended a meeting of human rights defenders in the southern city of Xiamen. Several attendees were later arrested in a sweeping crackdown, including Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong, China’s most prominent human rights lawyers. They remain in prison on convictions of subversion of state power.
Wu fled China soon after that meeting.
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Zhou Fengsuo, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests who is now in the US, said Wu’s arrest had created “enormous fear among many of my friends who fled the Chinese Communist party to look for some kind of protection in US”.
Shi, who spoke to Wu in detention, said his friend was “optimistic” about his asylum claim, but added: “He also feels frustrated because he thinks he shouldn’t have been arrested.” Wu’s immigration hearing is scheduled for 27 July, according to the New York Times.
Shi said it would be “awful” if Wu was sent back to China and that he risked being jailed there. Shi’s husband, Cheng Yuan, was jailed for five years in China for his activism.
Wu spoke this month at an event held to commemorate a national crackdown on Chinese human rights lawyers that took place in July 2015. “To the outside world, human rights lawyers might appear to be a group of tragic and heroic idealists,” he said. “However, for us, this is not a romantic or performative act, but rather an unavoidable mission and responsibility. Speaking out here today is not only for myself but for my fellow lawyers who remain behind bars and silenced.”
Additional research by Yu-chen Li
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