When Teresa Du entered customs at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on March 11, she never expected to be confronted with the same hate propaganda that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to persecute religious believers.
Even more concerning is that it came from a U.S. Customs official. Customs officers are employed by Customs and Border Protection, which is a federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security.
The officer spoke Chinese with a mainland accent, giving Ms. Du the impression that he was born in China. To fellow customs officers, he described Ms. Du, a U.S. natural-born citizen and native to Texas, as “illegal,” based on her religious beliefs, she says.
Ms. Du is a tour manager for New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts, whose eight touring groups perform in venues around the world each year. Ms. Du’s group had just returned from a tour in Europe and was set to next perform in Rosemont, Illinois.
“They’re Falun Gong. They’re political. They’re illegal,” the customs officer told his nearby co-workers, referring to Ms. Du and her fellow artists, Ms. Du told The Epoch Times. He repeated that multiple times, creating a hostile atmosphere, she said.
Many Shen Yun performers practice Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that’s severely persecuted in communist China. There, Falun Gong adherents are subjected to forced labor, torture, and even forced organ harvesting for persisting in their faith. Being “political” is a propaganda phrase the regime frequently uses to attack Falun Gong and any other dissidents the party targets for persecution.
Hearing such words uttered on U.S. soil came as a shock to Ms. Du. The ordeal left her in tears.
Ms. Du says that while the officer was examining her U.S. passport, he spoke to her in Chinese. She felt uncomfortable, and she eventually switched back to speaking English.
Then, she says, the officer asked, “Are you being sponsored by Falun Gong?” After Ms. Du refused to answer the question, he allowed her through.
“I’m an American citizen, and I was born in America. ... I was coming back home,“ she said. But ”it just felt like I was under verbal attack and verbal abuse.”
Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), a Republican congressman in Ms. Du’s home state, expressed disbelief upon hearing about Ms. Du’s experience and called for a “thorough investigation.”
“This is totally inexcusable for this to happen in the United States at the hands of an American official,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that “the customs official should be terminated immediately” if the complaint proves accurate.
“We should never allow the PRC—one of the most repressive countries on the planet—to have influence over our federal government,” he said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
The Epoch Times contacted Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with questions regarding the officer’s alleged behavior. A spokesperson for the agency told The Epoch Times that “CBP strictly prohibits profiling on the basis of race or religion.”
‘Call Them All Back’
Ms. Du said that the Chinese-speaking officer refused to let her remain in the vicinity to wait for other artists from her group—even though as tour manager, she’s responsible for logistics and translation when needed.“I was a little bit scared. He was being really aggressive toward me,” she said. “It just felt like it was going to start becoming physical.”
Three other artists with Shen Yun told The Epoch Times that they witnessed the behavior of the Chinese-speaking customs officer at the airport.
They say that in two cases, while artists were being processed by other customs officers, the man inserted himself into the process; and in one case attempted to gather information about the performers’ training facilities in New York.
In another instance, a dancer waiting in the queue heard the officer loudly say, “These people are Falun Gong.”
Even after the group passed through customs with a delay, Ms. Du said, two customs agents stopped them at the exit point, saying that they may not be able to let the group in as it “might be illegal” for them to enter the United States.
The Chinese-speaking officer, meanwhile, was suggesting to a supervisory agent to “call them all back.” The superior dismissed that as unnecessary and cleared the group after some brief questioning.
CCP Infiltration Concerns
The targeting of Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil has long been a concern for U.S. lawmakers and law enforcement agencies.John Chen, a 70-year-old U.S. citizen born in China, and Lin Feng, 43, a Chinese citizen, attempted to “manipulate the IRS Whistleblower Program, through bribery and deceit,” to strip an entity run and maintained by Falun Gong practitioners of its tax-exempt status, according to court filings unsealed on May 26.
The information they submitted to the IRS was “facially deficient and contains rhetoric similar to the propaganda that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] Government uses to justify its subjugation and harassment of Falun Gong members,” according to the complaint.
