ICE detains Chinese asylum-seeker
Wu Shaoping was stopped by ICE officers in Mount Holly Springs, a borough in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday while delivering parcels in his job as an Amazon courier, according to an account from Shi Minglei, a friend who spoke to Wu in detention on Thursday.
ICE agents asked Wu to provide proof of his citizenship, Shi said. Wu presented documentation of his pending asylum application and explained that he had entered the country legally. Officers arrested him and took him to a detention facility in Pennsylvania, according to Shi.
Wu fled China at the end of 2019 amid a sweeping crackdown on human rights lawyers. He traveled to the U.S. on a tourist visa and filed an asylum claim in 2020, for which he has not yet received a decision. In the U.S., he worked as an Amazon courier while remaining active in China’s embattled human rights community.
Wu’s wife, Li Caoliu, who lives in the U.S. with him, said that Wu “hoped that Chinese people could enjoy freedom and democracy, and did not like the way that China’s authoritarian system oppressed the common people.”
The detention facility and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Wu began 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 China in the 2010s. He took on sensitive cases involving religious minorities and political dissidents — the type of work that has resulted in many lawyers being disbarred or harassed.
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. Both remain in prison on convictions of subversion of state power. Wu fled China soon after that meeting.
This month Wu spoke 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 at the event. “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.”
Shi, who spoke to Wu in detention, described Wu as “optimistic” about his asylum claim “but he also feels frustrated because he thinks he shouldn’t have been arrested.” Wu’s immigration hearing is scheduled for July 27, 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.
MSI previously reported that a U.S. immigration judge granted asylum to Chinese national Guan Heng in January after he said he faced a “well-founded fear” of persecution for documenting alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
Zhou Fengsuo, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests who is now in the U.S., said Wu’s arrest “creates enormous fear among many of my friends who fled the Chinese Communist party to look for some kind of protection in US.”
Human rights groups have also raised concerns about Bai Zhaodong, a Chinese investigative journalist detained in Thailand. China’s foreign ministry confirmed to Reuters this week that China has submitted an extradition request for Bai, saying he is suspected of extortion and bribery by a non-public servant.