U.S. federal agents and local law enforcement entered and took over the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, on Friday, following a deadline issued by the Trump administration to close the facility.
The eviction comes as U.S. government officials told reporters that the decision to order the closure of the Houston diplomatic facility was “not random.”
Ahead of the eviction deadline, Houston police had set up barricades to close off streets near the building, the Chronicle reported.
National Security Concerns, Houston Facility ‘Not Random’
A senior Justice Department (DOJ) official told reporters in a teleconference on Friday that the Chinese consulate in Houston was implicated in an investigation of grant fraud at a Texas research institution, and that the decision by the United States to target that particular consulate “was not a random selection.”
The United States has alleged that the Houston Chinese consulate harbored Chinese spies who tried to steal data from facilities in Texas, including the Texas A&M medical system and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The DOJ official said that the closure of one consulate “as opposed to every facility” is intended “to send a message to the remaining [Chinese] officials that they’ve got to knock it off.”
“The espionage and influence activities run out of a consulate can rise ultimately to a level that threatens our national security,” the DOJ official said, later adding that there “has been an increase in malign activity, intelligence activity over time, and at some point you say enough is enough, and then you decide who is one of the worse offenders,” noting that “it is certainly not random that we picked Houston.”
A senior intelligence official said that theft of intellectual property and technology were prime concerns.
“We see this kind of behavior across the board. Houston in particular, though, their [science and technology] collectors were particularly aggressive and particularly successful. I think that is the reason why we tended towards Houston as well,” the intelligence official told reporters.
The senior DOJ official said that the charges represent “a microcosm” of a “broader network of individuals in more than 25 cities.”
“That network is supported through the consulates here. Consulates have been giving individuals in that network guidance on how to evade and obstruct our investigation,” the official said.
Roughly 80 percent of all economic espionage prosecutions brought by the DOJ allege criminal conduct intended to benefit the CCP. China is involved in some way in about 60 percent of all trade secret theft cases, according to the DOJ.
