In The Courts

The ACLU and its affiliates in Southern California and Washington, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the Law Offices of Stacy Tolchin, and Perkins Coie LLP filed a class action lawsuit in January 2017 challenging a federal government program used to deny or indefinitely delay thousands of law-abiding people—many of them from Muslim-majority countries—from becoming citizens or lawful residents due to unspecified “national security concerns.”

The ACLU represents Xiaoxing Xi, a Chinese-American physics professor at Temple University, who is suing the government over its dismissed prosecution of him for supposedly sharing sensitive technology with scientists in China. The lawsuit, filed in 2017, challenges the FBI’s baseless arrest of Xi and it surveillance methods as well as its discriminatory targeting of Chinese-American scientists.

In October 2021, the ACLU joined the legal team representing Sherry Chen, an award-winning Chinese American scientist who was wrongfully investigated, prosecuted, and terminated from her job as a hydrologist with the National Weather Service. The government accused Ms. Chen of unlawfully downloading sensitive government data and falsely portrayed her as a spy for China. On the eve of trial, the Justice Department dropped all charges against her. In 2019, Ms. Chen filed a federal lawsuit against the United States, seeking accountability for the government’s misconduct. In December 2022, Ms. Chen reached a historic settlement of her federal lawsuit and a separate case before the Merit Systems Protection Board, an agency that hears claims from federal employees. The settlement, one of the largest paid to an individual plaintiff in Commerce Department history, includes compensation valued at approximately $1.8 million.