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 grow to be APA Justice, probably the most 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 beneath 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’ve seen a number of failed and weak prosecutions. Ms. Chen is actually not alone in that regard,” Ashley Gorski, a senior employees lawyer with the ACLU Nationwide Safety Challenge, which helped characterize Chen, instructed MIT Know-how 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 really performed was use a shared password, extensively recognized inside her workplace, to entry a database for her work. The shortage of proof led the Justice Division to drop its costs 5 months after submitting them. Nonetheless, Chen was fired from her job—for a similar now-discredited causes that led to the FBI costs. 

The defective data got here from the Commerce Division’s Investigations and Risk 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 staff—and which named Chen’s case for example of misconduct. ITMS was disbanded shortly after the report was printed. 

Within the meantime, Chen filed a wrongful termination grievance to the Advantage Techniques Safety Board, a quasi-judicial physique that oversees employment instances involving federal staff, and received. 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 swimsuit towards the USA authorities for malicious prosecution and false arrest. Her authorized workforce sought $5 million in damages.