Unsafe in America: Transnational Repression in the United States

In July 2021, the Department of Justice revealed a kidnapping plot against Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist who has lived in the United States since 2009. According to the criminal indictment, agents of the Iranian government hired a private investigator to track her and her family’s movements in New York. They researched ways to abduct her, including hiring a high-speed boat that could transport her from the Brooklyn waterfront to Venezuela, and then on to Iran.1
Iranian authorities had already forced Alinejad’s sister to denounce her on state television in Iran and imprisoned her brother.2
 They also tried to pressure her family into convincing her to come to Turkey in an effort to set a trap for her. When the threats from afar, pressure on her family, and schemes to lure her to a third country did not work, Iran hired a private investigator to watch Alinejad. Just a year prior, the Iranian regime had successfully lured another journalist, Ruhollah Zam, into traveling from France to Iraq, from where he was kidnapped, returned to Iran, and executed.3

Autocrats cast a long shadow onto America’s soil. Alinejad’s experience, although shocking, is not isolated. Attacks against foreign dissidents living in the United States have taken place since at least the 1950s, but operations by foreign intelligence agents have significantly intensified in recent years. The governments of Iran, China, Egypt, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, and other states are increasingly and more aggressively disregarding US laws to threaten, harass, surveil, stalk, and even plot to physically harm people across the country.

By reaching across national borders to silence dissent, these governments are engaging in transnational repression. Potential targets of transnational repression in the United States include people who support human rights and democracy in their former homelands, and those who advocate for the well-being of friends and family they left behind.4
 Far from being a foreign problem, transnational repression impacts the lives and freedoms of people living in the United States. It violates their right to privacy, free expression, and free movement. The violence and harassment directed by authoritarian governments is not just a problem for the targeted individuals. Hindering their rights and freedoms has direct consequences for the quality of America’s democracy and institutions.

Autocrats cast a long shadow onto America’s soil.

Authorities, particularly at the federal level, are increasingly aware of the threat of transnational repression within the United States, and have taken steps to prevent the worst of it: assassination attempts, rendition, and assault. However, property damage, stalking, and intimidation still occur, causing severe disruption to people’s lives. The Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and State, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are part of a recently launched “whole-of-government” approach to this issue, which is being coordinated by the National Security Council. Significant effort has been expended to make federal law enforcement practices more responsive to the threat of transnational repression, deploy targeted sanctions to hold perpetrators accountable, and prosecute those engaging in the most aggressive campaigns. Important action has also been taken by Congress, including passage of legislation to help end the authoritarian practice of misusing Interpol to target critics.

However, more remains to be done, especially with regard to America’s immigration system, which is overwhelmed, understaffed, and vulnerable to exploitation by foreign governments. The costs of security cooperation and arms trade between the United States and governments that perpetrate transnational repression have also largely escaped scrutiny. The next phase in addressing the threat of transnational repression must ensure that America’s own institutions and practices cannot be easily co-opted by authoritarian states seeking to harm political exiles and diasporas.

Exporting authoritarianism: the effects of transnational repression in the United States

For this report, Freedom House interviewed 12 people living in the United States—citizens, permanent residents, and asylum seekers—who were targeted by foreign governments. Some of the people interviewed received threatening messages via phone calls and texts, or online. Others were surveilled at home or at work by people they suspected of working for foreign governments. Their family members abroad were intimidated. They were approached in public spaces or at events by strangers who urged them in menacing terms to stop their activism, or attempted to record them secretly. In at least one case, a targeted individual’s private property was damaged. Although their experiences varied, transnational repression—especially when involving multiple tactics—stripped away an individual’s sense of security. People experienced what one US-based Saudi activist described as “psychological and emotional warfare;”5
an avalanche of threats, leaving their days consumed with worry about the security of their family at home and vulnerable relatives abroad.

The next phase in addressing the threat of transnational repression must ensure that America’s own institutions and practices cannot be easily co-opted by authoritarian states seeking to harm political exiles and diasporas.

Intrusions into people’s private lives and homes are both disturbing and common. Samuel Chu, a Hong Kong–born American activist noticed a drone hover outside the windows of his home, apparently looking through his windows with a camera. Another activist targeted by China told Freedom House that people in vehicles were surveilling the office building as her organization was moving into it.

A Saudi activist campaigning for the release of a family member held by Riyadh explained how the unending wave of threats have made her hypervigilant. “This is my self-alarm. I have to be very careful wherever I go, even in the US. If I see anything or anyone suspicious, I always try to be careful. This is the sense of feeling unsafe because of all of the threats, being monitored, being stalked by the Saudi government. It’s all basically to silence our voices.”6

Mohamed Soltan, an Egyptian-American who grew up in the Midwest, was imprisoned in Egypt for two years for participating in protests that followed the military coup against President Mohamed Morsi in 2012. Soltan, who was released from prison in 2015, continued his activism in the United States, most recently by filing a suit against the Egyptian authorities for torturing him during his imprisonment.7
 In retaliation, Egyptian authorities have imprisoned Soltan’s father and cousins.8
 They have also threatened him online, formally requested his extradition, and even sent agents to the United States to collect information on him. Reflecting on his experience, Soltan said, “How emboldened must they [the Egyptian authorities] feel to do things on US soil? How empowered must they feel? What sense of impunity must they have?”

“This is my self-alarm. I have to be very careful wherever I go, even in the US. If I see anything or anyone suspicious, I always try to be careful.”

Some people continue to communicate, but only in coded ways. An asylum seeker currently living in the United States who has campaigned for the release of family members imprisoned in Saudi Arabia described speaking to her mother using code: “I talk to my mom every day,” she said, “but if we talk about my advocacy in the US, we talk about me speaking about environmentalism in Maine.”10
 Others maintain lines of communication but avoid potentially dangerous topics to try to keep their interlocutors safe. One academic from Indian-administered Kashmir said, of contacts in Kashmir: “Whenever I call my family members there, it’s just ‘Hi, hello, how are you? How is everyone there?’ We don’t talk about anything. I don’t ask my friends or colleagues about things that are happening there because so many journalists and human rights defenders have gotten detained.”11

Being targeted by a foreign government also places real limitations on people’s ability to travel internationally for work, pleasure, or to see family. In Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach, Freedom House described the way that autocratic states leverage their control over government-issued documents to coerce and control citizens.12
 But even for those who have obtained US citizenship or permanent residency and therefore no longer rely on their origin-country passports, travel can be dangerous. In August of 2020, Paul Rusesabagina, a US permanent resident and well-known Rwandan activist, was apprehended while he was travelling from the Middle East when the private plane that he thought was flying to Burundi landed in Rwanda instead.13
 Rusesabagina was later convicted of terrorism and sentenced to 25 years in prison in a seriously flawed and highly politicized trial where he was refused access to evidence and to his own lawyer, and during which President Kagame publicly denounced him as a criminal.14

In addition to making international travel unsafe, transnational repression cuts off targeted individuals from entire regions of the world. Members of diasporas that Freedom House spoke to expressed deep reservations about traveling and being identified in many countries they felt were unsafe. A Saudi activist feared traveling: “I know that anywhere in the Middle East is off limits for me. I can’t go anywhere…even places like North Africa. I would love to go [there], but I’m scared.”15
 She had been badly shaken by the experience of being surveilled and followed in a European city after traveling there to attend a human rights conference in 2019. Others noted that they would not travel to countries that neighbored origin states or had friendly diplomatic relations with those states. More than an inconvenience, this limitation deprived people of mobility and the opportunity to see their families and friends.

In their pursuit of activists, autocrats seek to infiltrate, sow division, and introduce suspicion in diaspora communities. The recruitment of informants, whose primary purpose is to collect information, has the effect of isolating people from others who share their language or cultural traditions and on whom they rely for community. The possibility that members of their community are working for the Chinese state leads many Uyghurs—a group that has been relentlessly targeted by Chinese officials for decades, and for whom repression in China has intensified dramatically since 2017—to maintain their distance from each other in the United States.16
 Mustafa Aksu, a Uyghur who lives in Washington, D.C., observed that concerns about infiltration in the community stoke fears about how activism in the United States, even quiet, community-based work, can make the situation of people’s relatives back in China worse.17
 Another Uyghur, Ferkat Jawdat, who has vocally campaigned on behalf of his family in China, noted: “In the community, some people have moved away because they are worried that others may be passing some news or information to China.” These fears of infiltration are not unfounded. There are documented cases where members of the Uyghur diaspora were pressured to act as informants while abroad.18
 Beijing’s efforts in the United States are also not limited to Uyghurs; authorities also pursue Hong Kongers, Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, people accused of financial crimes, and critics of the authorities more broadly. In 2020, an ethnically Tibetan New York City police officer was charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government and trying to collect information on New York’s Tibetan diaspora.

Being targeted by authoritarian governments employing tactics of transnational repression transforms people’s lives in both small and profound ways.

In addition to affecting people’s individual rights and freedoms, transnational repression is increasingly threatening the democratic processes of the United States. In March 2022, the FBI unsealed criminal indictments that included charges against a member of China’s Ministry of State Security, who had hired a private investigator in New York to collect information on a former 1989 Tiananmen Square protest leader who was running for a seat in the US House of Representatives. The Chinese agent sought information that would damage the candidate’s political career. Failing that, he suggested to the private investigator that damaging information could be manufactured or that the candidate could even be physically attacked to prevent him from participating in the election.19
 The goal, as detailed in the indictment, was to stop the candidate from “drawing attention to himself or his political speech.”20
 This marked a new and strikingly bold attempt to stop criticism of a foreign state by an American citizen in the United States, and is emblematic of China’s expanding and aggressive campaign of transnational repression that targets many diverse diasporas from Uyghurs to Hong Kongers and Han Chinese dissidents.

Activists uncowed, but in need of support

The resilience of activists, dissidents, and political exiles in the face of transnational repression is striking.

These internal changes have been accompanied by efforts to engage with the public. In March 2022, the FBI launched a website explaining what transnational repression is, providing examples of the forms it can take as well as information on how to report incidents.22
 Since August 2021, the FBI has also published two unclassified counterintelligence bulletins about the threat of transnational repression. The first was specifically designed to inform the Uyghur community of the fact that Chinese government officials “target US-based Uyghurs through in-person and digital means to silence dissent, issue instructions, collect information, and compel compliance.”23
 The second bulletin highlighted how governments of other countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Rwanda, engage in transnational repression in the United States.24

Outreach to vulnerable communities is a good way of building resilience against transnational repression. However, the FBI faces serious obstacles in encouraging reporting, especially by communities made up of noncitizens, people of color, and those who may have suffered repression at the hands of security agencies and police in other countries. These communities may lack trust in the FBI for well-founded reasons.

Concerns have been raised for years by civil liberties groups about surveillance programs, including social media monitoring, run by federal and local law enforcement agencies in the United States that allegedly focus on visa applicants, as well as members of religious, racial, and ethnic minorities.25
 Recent reports of the FBI acquiring and testing software made by the NSO Group, which has been implicated widely in the surveillance and hacking of activists and journalists by authoritarian countries, are likely to underscore these concerns.26

Unease created by fears of surveillance may intersect with concerns about how the collected information could potentially be used. Some diaspora members interviewed by Freedom House noted suspicions that contact with US law enforcement may place them in more, not less, danger: “Part of the reason why people won’t speak up is because they know the government of Rwanda has a very tight relationship with the US government, and sharing information, they think they’re telling on themselves,” said Gatebuke, the Rwandan-American activist. These issues could impede the FBI’s efforts at informing vulnerable diasporas about the threat of transnational repression and the resources that are available to them.

Lacking lawful status, some in targeted communities will not report transnational repression

In a positive step forward, the Department of Justice has begun to issue indictments against individuals in connection to incidents of transnational repression.

There is widespread agreement across law enforcement, prosecutors, and policy makers that existing US law is insufficient to address transnational repression and that updates are needed. Instead of using the framework of foreign agents, one possible alternative approach would be to center the dangerous activity in legislation rather than the status of the perpetrator. Sweden, and some other European countries, for example, treat the collection of information on individuals on behalf of a foreign state as a specific kind of espionage. Sweden’s criminal code prohibits obtaining information secretly, fraudulently, or via “improper means” about a person for the benefit of a foreign power.45
 This directly addresses the problematic activity and may better deter tracking, surveilling, and informing on critics of an authoritarian regime in the United States.

Any effort to design new criminal legislation should prioritize safeguarding rights and make sure to avoid infringing on fundamental freedoms, encouraging xenophobia, or unduly singling out people engaged in legitimate activities such as academic research. As media reporting and academic research have shown, policies designed to address specific threats after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, increased the surveillance and marginalization of minority communities, leading to significant negative effects on individual rights and freedoms.46
 Every effort should be made to avoid a similar outcome from policies aimed at stemming the tactics of transnational repression. Authorities need to consult with at-risk communities to ascertain what they view as an appropriate response to malign actions by foreign states.

FARA was designed to be a mechanism for ensuring transparency rather than for deterring criminal activity. Examining how loopholes in FARA registration are exploited, specifically the way they permit repressive governments to legally pay someone in the United States to collect information on targets, could be a positive intermediate step. For example, Michelle Martin, a US citizen who registered under FARA as an agent of the Rwandan government, was able to join Paul Rusesabagina’s foundation, collect information on him, and subsequently testify at his trial in Rwanda after he was abducted and returned to the country.47
 Martin’s FARA registration described her work as research focused on organization and political activity among the Rwandan diaspora and on documenting genocide denial or genocide ideology.48
 Martin’s FARA registration allowed her to collect information as part of legal “lobbying” activity that eventually caused direct harm to a permanent resident of the United States.

Interpol abuse

Interpol—formally the International Criminal Police Organization—facilitates international cooperation on criminal matters. It does not, as popularly believed, fight international crime. Interpol notices are a method for distributing information about wanted or missing people and stolen passports among member states; they are not international arrest warrants. Interpol prohibits its members from using notices to engage in political, military, or religious activities. This means that countries should only submit notices and diffusions in cases of ordinary, non-political crime. (A diffusion is information that is shared directly between member states rather than by Interpol.) Despite this, in a practice that has come to be known as “Interpol abuse,” the governments of countries including Turkey, Russia, and China issue Interpol Red Notices to detain exiles and dissidents beyond their borders, including in the United States.

US authorities are keenly aware of the problem of Interpol abuse. In late 2021, Congress passed the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).49
 The TRAP Act attempts to counter cooptation of Interpol by authoritarian states and sets guidance for the United States to leverage its role as the organization’s biggest funder to pursue institutional reform. While this is crucial to countering Interpol abuse internationally, the Act does not address the detrimental impact of abusive Red Notices on people who are moving through America’s immigration system.

The TRAP Act confirms guidance issued by the Department of Justice that Interpol notices do not meet constitutionally guaranteed due process standards50
 and therefore cannot be used for the purposes of arrest or extradition. However, in practice, Interpol’s Red Notices are never used directly for extradition or detention.51
 Instead, Red Notices are used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to locate and target noncitizens with immigration violations, which can then lead to their removal from the country. This problem is known as “denial of services,” whereby Red Notices lead to denial of immigration services that an individual would otherwise be entitled to. In an infamous case from 2017, Alexey Kharis spent 15 months in detention in California after his visa was revoked as a result of an abusive Interpol Red Notice issued by Moscow.52
 Kharis had come to the United States after his construction company in Vladivostok was seized by authorities when he refused to cooperate with an embezzlement scheme run by regional officials. In another case, Gregory Duralev spent 18 months in a maximum-security prison after he was arrested by ICE during his asylum interview based on an Interpol notice issued by Russia, which accused him of fraud.53
 The problem may even be more widespread than publicly reported. At the time of writing, Freedom House was aware of fifteen ongoing cases at US immigration courts that involve Interpol notices from countries known to issue abusive Red Notices.

Red Notices can also present obstacles to claims for asylum made in the United States. A recent decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals held that a Red Notice could be construed as “reliable evidence [of] a serious nonpolitical crime.” This is one of the statutory bars that, if triggered, leads to an automatic denial of asylum.54
 Frustratingly, noncitizen defendants in immigration courts in the United States are not entitled to government-provided counsel. In cases involving Red Notices, people claiming asylum are left to represent themselves without legal counsel against the government of the United States, the foreign government issuing the notice, and the perceived legitimacy of Interpol. Unassisted, these individuals must overcome the burden of explaining why Red Notices are mere unvetted accusations, not evidence of a crime. In sum, despite the consequential passage of the TRAP Act, Interpol abuse against people in the United States—including many with lawful immigration status—remains possible.

Ensuring accountability

While strengthening protections for targeted individuals is crucial to protecting human rights and freedoms—and making America a safer place for activists and political exiles—the ultimate defense against spreading authoritarianism is to raise the cost of repression. On this front, the United States has an opportunity to lead the world’s response. One way to do so is by deploying targeted sanctions against perpetrators of transnational repression.

In February 2021, the US government announced the Khashoggi Ban, a measure that allows the State Department to impose visa restrictions on individuals who “directly engage in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities, including those that suppress, harass, surveil, threaten, or harm journalists, activists, or other persons perceived to be dissidents.”55
 The policy came as a response to the 2018 murder in Istanbul of Jamal Khashoggi, a US permanent resident, journalist, and vocal critic of Saudi authorities, by Saudi agents at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Authority for the Khashoggi Ban is derived from Section 212 (a)(3)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows for the denial of a visa in cases where an individual’s entry to the country could have potentially serious adverse foreign policy impacts for the United States. Though the authorities granted by this provision are longstanding, the Khashoggi Ban established, for the first time, a clear link between acts targeting dissidents across borders and a foreign policy meant to address them.56
 The ban has subsequently been applied to Belarusian officials for extraterritorial, counterdissident activities. It is important to note that the government is not permitted to publicly share the names of those subjected to this ban, reducing its visibility and deterrent effect.57

An even stronger visa ban option is the authority provided in Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Acts. This authority allows visa bans against foreign government officials, and their family members, when there is credible information that the official is directly or indirectly involved with significant corruption or gross violations of human rights. This authority allows the US government to publicly name sanctioned individuals.

Sanctions programs that allow for both visa bans and asset freezes can be even more effective tools. The United States should deploy these stronger options against perpetrators of transnational repression whenever possible. This includes certain country-specific programs as well as the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act (22 U.S.C. §§ 10101-10103 (2022)), which, as implemented by Executive Order 13818, allows visa bans and asset freezes on individuals who are responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse or corruption.

The ultimate defense against spreading authoritarianism is to raise the cost of repression.

Beyond their practical effects, sanctions are highly visible methods of accountability that signal a strong rebuke to transnational repression. Members of the Saudi diaspora interviewed by Freedom House felt that the failure to sanction Mohammed bin Salman following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi sent a message of impunity that had negative consequences for them personally: “MBS was not forgiven, but he was not sanctioned. He was not included. Right after that, things quickly changed for us…it seemed like there was a reaction from the Saudi government that, okay, there’s no consequences. We can do whatever we want.”58

Assessing the costs of security cooperation

Building a robust response to authoritarianism means recognizing and acknowledging that countries that are US security partners engage in transnational repression, including on US soil. The focus of efforts to ensure accountability cannot be limited to adversaries like the ruling regimes of Iran, China, and Russia. Targets of transnational repression often view ongoing cooperation between the United States and authoritarian states as tacit endorsement of abuse. Claude Gatebuke, who has been harassed by Rwandan officials, observed: “I think the US should stop supporting Rwanda…Basically, I’m paying taxes, part of it is contributing to my potential assassination, so I think we should stop financing the government of Rwanda and providing military assistance.”

To signal a commitment to stopping transnational repression, the United States should reassess existing security training programs offered directly or indirectly to agents of countries that have a documented track record of committing human rights abuses. For example, reporting by the New York Times in 2021 revealed that members of the team that killed Jamal Khashoggi has previously received paramilitary training in the Unites States from a State Department contractor.59
 The United States can also weigh human rights considerations, including evidence of persecution of political exiles, in making decisions about trade. In light of US trade relations with Egypt, including a recently announced arms sale worth $2.5 billion,60
 Mohammed Soltan observed: “The sense of impunity is going to make them [the Egyptian government] get more and more emboldened because they’re always going to test the limits of what they can get away with.”

Possibly the biggest challenge in terms of transnational repression for the Unites States and other democratic countries that are home to dissidents and political exiles is the impact of coercion by proxy, in which a person’s family, loved one, or business located in origin state is targeted. Even when the dissident is out of reach of direct violence or harassment, they continue to be vulnerable to transnational repression because other people close to them can be taken hostage by autocrats. Coercion by proxy is an incredibly potent tactic of transnational repression, and one that’s available to states that lack the resources to reach physically or digitally beyond their borders. It can lead self-censorship and takes an emotional toll on the victim. As one Saudi activist said: “If I say something and they want to shut me up me up but I’m here and they can’t get to me, they will pick one of my family members…Whatever I do here, I always fear that my family will get punished.”61
 The US government’s strategy for countering transnational repression should give specific consideration to addressing coercion by proxy. This should include social and psychological support for people targeted in the United States, as well as ways to account for coercion by proxy in existing tools for assessing the human rights practices of foreign states and imposing accountability for violations.