Chen’s case mobilized a grassroots advocacy community of involved Chinese-American residents, who raised consciousness about her expertise, lobbied members of Congress on her behalf, and raised cash for her authorized protection. One of those teams would later turn into APA Justice, probably the most vocal and constant voices towards the China Initiative and racial profiling.
When information broke that Chinese-American teachers had been once more being investigated and terminated beneath suspicion of espionage in 2019, the networks initially created to assist Chen reactivated.
For many observers, the parallels had been clear. “With the China Initiative, we have seen several failed and weak prosecutions. Ms. Chen is certainly not alone in that regard,” Ashley Gorski, a senior workers legal professional with the ACLU National Security Project, which helped signify Chen, advised MIT Technology Review.
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 scientists. Further investigation revealed that what Chen had really accomplished was use a shared password, extensively recognized inside her workplace, to entry a database for her work. The lack of proof led the Justice Department to drop its prices 5 months after submitting them. Still, Chen was fired from her job—for a similar now-discredited causes that led to the FBI prices.
The defective data got here from the Commerce Department’s Investigations and Threat Management 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-American and different workers—and which named Chen’s case for example of misconduct. ITMS was disbanded shortly after the report was printed.
In the meantime, Chen filed a wrongful termination grievance to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a quasi-judicial physique that oversees employment instances involving federal workers, and received. But the Commerce Department, which oversees the National Weather 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 the United States authorities for malicious prosecution and false arrest. Her authorized staff sought $5 million in damages.