🚨 A Chinese Human Rights Lawyer Beijing Has Hunted for Years Is Sitting in a Pennsylvania ICE Cell

Wu Shaoping fled China in 2019 after defending Falun Gong practitioners, Christians, and dissidents. His asylum case is still pending. Deportation would hand the Chinese Communist Party a trophy.

On the morning of July 15, Wu Shaoping, one of China's most prominent exiled human rights lawyers, was pulled over on a delivery run near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A routine records check flagged that he had been in the United States for six years without a green card. Local police called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) @ICEgov. By that afternoon, Wu was in the back of a federal vehicle, headed to an ICE detention facility in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania.

He is now sitting in a cell. The government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) would like nothing more than to see him boarded onto the next flight home.

This is not an ordinary asylum case, and Wu is not an ordinary man.

Who Wu Shaoping actually is

Wu spent more than a decade practicing law in Shanghai, where he became a partner and deputy director at multiple firms and built a reputation for taking the cases most Chinese lawyers refuse to touch: Falun Gong practitioners, underground Christians, dissidents, and ordinary citizens punished for exercising rights their own constitution supposedly guarantees. He was a member of the China Human Rights Lawyers Group and a participant in the New Citizens Movement, the civil rights campaign led by Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi. Both men are now serving 14-year and 12-year prison sentences for "subversion of state power," handed down in a closed-door trial in Shandong in April 2023, after arrests that flowed from the same 2019 crackdown that eventually forced Wu himself into exile.

In one 2019 case in Yinchuan, Ningxia, Wu tore apart every piece of prosecution "evidence" against a Falun Gong practitioner in open court, until the officers on the stand admitted that the deposition they had produced was a fabrication. The presiding Chinese Communist Party (CCP) judge, humiliated, had him physically removed from the courtroom. That is what defending human rights inside the PRC actually looks like.

Later that year, after the CCP launched a nationwide sweep tied to the so-called Xiamen gathering case, Wu fled. He reached the United States on a tourist visa in December 2019 and applied for political asylum. That application is still working its way through the immigration system.

What his file in America actually shows

Wu is not living in the shadows. He holds a valid Employment Authorization Document (EAD). He has a fixed address, family in the country, and no criminal record. He was not stopped for anything he did wrong. He was flagged during a traffic check, in the most banal way possible.

What he has been doing in America is the problem, but only for Beijing.

Since arriving, Wu has been a regular commentator on New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television, criticizing the CCP by name and on the record. In October 2025, he co-founded the Overseas Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Association alongside fellow exiled attorneys You Feizhu and Xu Silong. He has testified at conferences, spoken this month at a commemoration of China's 2015 "709 Crackdown" on rights lawyers, and been photographed with U.S. lawmakers, including then-Representative Mike Gallagher, then chair of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, at a New York rally denouncing the CCP's overseas police stations.

For Xi Jinping's security apparatus, that is a résumé of enemy activity.

Beijing has a documented playbook for rights lawyers who fit that profile, once in its custody: incommunicado detention under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), coerced televised confessions, closed-door trials, subversion charges, and prison terms measured in decades. Yu Wensheng, Wang Quanzhang, Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi — the list is long. None of them did more, publicly, than Wu has done from exile.

Voices already speaking up

The response has moved quickly. Margaret L. Satterthwaite @SRjudgeslawyers, the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, said in an X post on July 15, reported by Epoch Times, that news of Wu's detention was troubling and that she is monitoring the case. Zhou Fengsuo @ZhouFengSuo, founder of the U.S.-based rights group Humanitarian China @hrichina, urged U.S. authorities to exercise their discretion and release Wu while his asylum case proceeds, warning that repatriation would expose him to severe persecution. You Feizhu @youfeizhu, one of Wu's co-founders at the Overseas Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Association @rqlslm, made a parallel appeal, citing Wu's long record of peaceful advocacy and the danger awaiting him if returned.

Several other Chinese dissidents with pending asylum cases have been picked up by ICE in recent weeks as enforcement has broadened. Wu's case is now drawing the widest attention because of his profile and because the stakes are visible to anyone reading them honestly.

The one thing that matters now

No one is asking ICE to look the other way on immigration law. Wu's asylum case exists precisely so a U.S. immigration judge can weigh the persecution risk in front of them. What advocates are asking for is narrower and squarely within existing authority: release Wu on his existing work authorization while his asylum petition is adjudicated on the merits, and do not remove him to the one country whose leadership has been publicly named, sanctioned, and investigated for exactly the kind of transnational repression Wu has spent his life documenting.

Washington has spent years building a case, in Congress and in the courtroom, against CCP transnational repression. Wu Shaoping is a living witness to that case. He should be released to keep telling it.

ACI — Aric Chen | Insights

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