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. Certainly one of these teams would later turn out to be APA Justice, one of the vocal and constant voices towards the China Initiative and racial profiling.
When information broke that Chinese language-American lecturers had been once more being investigated and terminated underneath suspicion of espionage in 2019, the networks initially created to assist Chen reactivated.
For a lot of observers, the parallels had been clear. “With the China Initiative, we now have seen a number of failed and weak prosecutions. Ms. Chen is definitely not alone in that regard,” Ashley Gorski, a senior workers legal professional with the ACLU Nationwide Safety Venture, which helped characterize Chen, instructed MIT Expertise 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 accomplished was use a shared password, broadly identified inside her workplace, to entry a database for her work. The shortage of proof led the Justice Division to drop its fees 5 months after submitting them. Nonetheless, Chen was fired from her job—for a similar now-discredited causes that led to the FBI fees.
The defective data got here from the Commerce Division’s Investigations and Menace Administration Service (ITMS), an inside 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 workers—and which named Chen’s case for instance of misconduct. ITMS was disbanded shortly after the report was revealed.
Within the meantime, Chen filed a wrongful termination grievance to the Benefit Methods Safety Board, a quasi-judicial physique that oversees employment instances involving federal workers, and gained. However the Commerce Division, which oversees the Nationwide Climate Service, appealed. Personnel shortages on the MSPB left the enchantment 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 staff sought $5 million in damages.
