A wrongfully terminated Chinese-American scientist was just awarded nearly $2 million in damages

It’s been astir a decennary since the Chinese-American hydrologist Sherry Chen’s beingness was turned upside down by an unfounded accusation of spying, and this week, she yet received thing similar justice. 

Today, Chen’s lawyers announced that the idiosyncratic won a historical $1.8 cardinal colony from the US Commerce Department for her wrongful prosecution and consequent termination from the National Weather Service. “The government’s probe and prosecution of maine was discriminatory and unjustified,” Chen said successful a statement. “The Commerce Department is yet being held liable for its wrongdoing … No 1 other should person to endure this injustice.” 

Chen’s lawsuit was an aboriginal lawsuit of what would go a overmuch bigger signifier of the US government’s expanding suspicion of Chinese and Chinese-American scientists amid increasing contention betwixt the US and China. The colony is simply a idiosyncratic and symbolic triumph aft years of persecution.

Chen’s probe and firing predated the Justice Department’s China Initiative, a Trump-era programme to antagonistic Chinese economical espionage that, contempt its stated goals, disproportionately targeted Chinese-American world researchers for alleged assistance fraud oregon disclosure issues—and saw a higher fig of cases autumn isolated earlier proceedings than the national average. 

Chen’s lawsuit mobilized a grassroots advocacy web of acrophobic Chinese-American citizens, who raised consciousness astir her experience, lobbied members of Congress connected her behalf, and raised wealth for her ineligible defense. One of these groups would aboriginal go APA Justice, 1 of the astir vocal and accordant voices against the China Initiative and radical profiling.

When news broke that Chinese-American academics were again being investigated and terminated nether suspicion of espionage successful 2019, the networks primitively created to enactment Chen reactivated. 

For galore observers, the parallels were clear. “With the China Initiative, we person seen respective failed and anemic prosecutions. Ms. Chen is surely not unsocial successful that regard,” Ashley Gorski, a elder unit lawyer with the ACLU National Security Project, which helped correspond Chen, told MIT Technology Review. 

Chen was arrested successful 2014 and charged with espionage by the FBI, which alleged that she illegally accessed a authorities database to stock delicate accusation astir American dams with Chinese scientists. Further probe revealed that what Chen had really done was usage a shared password, wide known wrong her office, to entree a database for her work. The deficiency of grounds led the Justice Department to driblet its charges 5 months aft filing them. Still, Chen was fired from her job—for the aforesaid now-discredited reasons that led to the FBI charges. 

The faulty accusation came from the Commerce Department’s Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS), an interior information portion that a July 2021 Senate investigation recovered had engaged successful wide patterns of unfounded, discriminatory investigations aimed astatine Chinese-American and different employees—and which named Chen’s lawsuit arsenic an illustration of misconduct. ITMS was disbanded soon aft the study was published. 

In the meantime, Chen filed a wrongful termination grievance to the Merit Systems Protection Board, a quasi-judicial assemblage that oversees employment cases involving national employees, and won. But the Commerce Department, which oversees the National Weather Service, appealed. Personnel shortages astatine the MSPB near the entreaty successful limbo for years, truthful successful 2019, Chen filed a civil suit against the United States authorities for malicious prosecution and mendacious arrest. Her ineligible squad sought $5 cardinal successful damages. 

Chen’s settlement—$550,000 up front, followed by $1.25 cardinal to beryllium paid retired implicit the adjacent 10 years—is the culmination of those efforts. In summation to the monetary damages, Chen’s lawyers accidental that the Commerce Department volition besides big a backstage gathering with the idiosyncratic and supply a missive acknowledging her grounds and accomplishments arsenic a authorities hydrologist. 

It’s not rather the apology that Chen’s supporters, organized by the advocacy enactment APA Justice and signed by implicit 1,000 individuals and organizations, demanded successful an open letter sent earlier this twelvemonth to Gina Raimondo, the caput of commerce. However, the accidental to beryllium down with Commerce Department officials and the committedness of a written acknowledgement “were precise important to Ms. Chen and were negotiated arsenic portion of the settlement,” Gorski told us. 

The symbolism of her colony whitethorn beryllium particularly invited successful the aftermath of the ill-fated China Initiative, which MIT Technology Review investigated past twelvemonth and recovered to beryllium ineffective with respect to its stated goals and to person overwhelmingly targeted individuals of Chinese heritage, who made up 90% of defendants.

The Biden medication officially ended the China Initiative successful February, but galore studies person pointed to its broader chilling effects connected technological collaboration betwixt the US and China, arsenic good arsenic declining involvement successful the United States arsenic a destination for higher acquisition and research. Not to notation the lingering idiosyncratic effects for individuals caught up successful the web, adjacent if they were yet cleared. 

That gives added value to the result of Chen’s lawsuits. “It’s an tremendous triumph for Ms. Chen personally,” said Gorski, “and for the Chinese-American assemblage arsenic well. The colony makes wide that erstwhile the authorities discriminates, it’s going to beryllium held accountable.”