Within months of Trump’s return to the White House, immigrant academics are under severe attacks. Rising U.S. nationalism and growing geopolitical tensions with China have led policy-makers to routinely paint Chinese students and faculty with a broad brush as “spies” or “threats to national security,” leading to visa revocations, denial of entry, and even deportations.

These actions not only jeopardize scientific research, funding, and careers, but are also glaring civil rights violations and create a pervasive climate of fear across the academic community.

Now House Republicans introduced a FY 2026 Appropriations bill which de facto reinstates the “China Initiative”, a Trump-era program launched in 2018 that deployed FBI agents to campuses under the guise of “countering CCP economic espionage”. The initiative drew sharp criticism for racial profiling and unjustly prosecuting Chinese American and immigrant scholars—disrupting the lives of hundreds, and is even linked to the suicide of a Northwestern faculty member recently.

If the House language were to make it into the Senate version of the bill, it would put Chinese and other international scholars at further risk. We need to urge Senators to reject any effort to include language to revive the “China Initiative” in the Senate version of the CJS Appropriations bill.

Fill out the form to email your Democratic Senator and urge them to oppose any effort to bring back the "China Initiative"!