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When President Trump traveled to China in 2017, he handed Xi Jinping a list of names he wanted freed. My parents were on it.
That moment mattered. As China’s internment campaign in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was beginning, my parents were vulnerable because I had spoken out in the United States about the Chinese Communist Party’s abuses. Their names, placed directly before Xi by the President of the United States, sent a signal that they were not invisible.
But a name on a list matters only if a president keeps pressing. My mother remained trapped by Beijing for nearly two decades — leverage against my human rights advocacy, a hostage to the assumption that I would eventually go quiet. Cabinet secretaries raised her case. Diplomats pressed it repeatedly. None of it moved Beijing. She came home on Thanksgiving Eve 2024 only after President Biden raised her case directly with Xi.
My father did not make it. He died in April 2022 at eighty-three, after years of enforced isolation. Because Beijing had sanctioned me personally for my advocacy, I could not attend his funeral. He never met his American grandchildren. That is the cost of inaction — not in a single dramatic moment, but over years quietly taken away.
Now President Trump is preparing to meet Xi again, in Beijing on May 14 and 15. He should carry another list.
This is not a side issue to trade, tariffs, critical minerals, or sanctions. American citizens, lawful permanent residents, and the relatives of Americans are being detained, imprisoned, or trapped under exit bans by the CCP to coerce silence, extract concessions, and censor people inside the United States. This is hostage-taking. It is an unacceptable instrument of state coercion directed at the United States — and it is a direct challenge to American sovereignty. When a foreign government coerces Americans on American soil, it has moved well beyond a human rights issue. It is a test of American will.
Cases like these are not resolved through normal diplomatic channels. In China’s political system, they reach only one level: Xi Jinping. Prosecutors, security agencies, ministries, and provincial officials all wait for permission from above. Lawyers working on detention cases involving foreign leverage have told me directly: permission to free a hostage can only come from Xi. Ambassadors can raise names. Cabinet officials can press counterparts. Diplomats can knock on doors. Only a president can open them.
President Trump has made the return of unjustly detained Americans a defining foreign-policy priority. His message to Xi should be unambiguous: American families are not bargaining chips, and the United States will not accept hostage-taking or exit bans as a normal feature of bilateral relations. He should demand releases, humanitarian transfers, the lifting of exit bans, and regular access for U.S. officials and families.
He should also direct his administration to maintain a standing, confidential list of Americans, lawful permanent residents, and U.S.-linked relatives detained or trapped in China — to be raised in every future engagement with Chinese officials. That task should be assigned to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Rubio understands the realities in China better than most. As a senator, he helped build the legal architecture that now gives this administration its leverage: the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which President Trump signed in 2020; the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, signed by President Biden in 2021. Across administrations, leaders of both parties built this framework — Speaker Nancy Pelosi helped move key protections through the House; Secretary Mike Pompeo determined that China is committing genocide against the Uyghur people, a finding Secretary Antony Blinken affirmed. Beijing recognized what that meant before Washington fully did. In retaliation, it sanctioned Rubio — and sanctioned me. A foreign government does not sanction its ineffective critics. It sanctioned him because he was effective.
Many who admired Rubio’s Senate record have been genuinely unsettled by his first months as secretary of state — the silences where they expected statements, the accommodation where they expected pressure. I understand why. I have had my own moments of it. But I am not prepared to conclude that the man who built this framework has abandoned it. He is right there — with more institutional power than he has ever had, and an adversary he has studied for a long time.
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Rubio’s opposition to the Chinese Communist Party is rooted in something deeper than policy calculation — just as mine is. His family fled Cuba. My mother gave birth to me in a reeducation camp in Kashgar. We came to this fight by different paths but reached the same conclusion: authoritarian governments use families as instruments of coercion. The answer is not accommodation. It is pressure.
The list President Trump carries to Beijing should include Gulshan Abbas, imprisoned in retaliation for her sister’s advocacy in the United States; the artist Gao Shen, a U.S. resident detained without transparent legal process; Pastor Ezra Jin, held on opaque charges; and the relatives of Uyghur-American journalists at Radio Free Asia — Kurban Mamut, Abdukadir and Ahamatjan Juma, and Hasanjan Niyaz — detained as leverage against American reporters working for a U.S.-funded media organization. For these families, freedom often begins with a name spoken in the right room.
And under Xi Jinping, there is only one room that matters.
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My mother’s journey to America began when President Trump carried a list to China in 2017. She waited years for her name to reach the right room. My father died before freedom came.
Tonight, other families are still waiting.