Statement to the House Judiciary Committee Hearing on FBI Oversight

Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC (Advancing Justice | AAJC) respectfully submits this testimony for the record for the public hearing entitled, “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigations” held on February 5, 2020 by the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary in Washington, D.C. We write to express our concerns about the FBI’s profiling and wrongful prosecutions for espionage of students, scientists, and researchers of Asian descent.

Advancing Justice | AAJC is a national non-profit, non-partisan organization that works through policy advocacy, education, and litigation to advance the civil and human rights of Asian Americans and to build and promote a fair and equitable society for all. Founded in 1991, Advancing Justice | AAJC is one of the nation's leading experts on civil rights issues of importance to the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community including immigration and immigrants’ rights, census, hate incidents, language access, technology and telecommunications, and voting rights.

We appreciate this opportunity to submit a statement for this hearing on the harms resulting from the profiling of our communities by the FBI. Advancing Justice | AAJC seeks to draw the committee’s attention to our concerns about the FBI’s surveillance and profiling of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. Biased public statements by public officials combined with data and individual cases indicating that there have been wrongful arrests and prosecutions of innocent Asian Americans have raised red flags for us that the FBI may be engaged in biased policing. We describe existing agency biases and profiling, and how efforts to prosecute our communities for espionage-related claims have been extremely harmful. Despite the ongoing issues of implicit bias, discrimination, and race and ethnicity-based profiling, the U.S. government has called for expanding efforts that would lead to more wrongful prosecutions of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. We provide reasons for our opposition to escalating these efforts which only serve to undermine our American values. We encourage the committee to consider the facts below in contemplating any further oversight activities.