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Before U.S. President Donald Trump flew to Beijing last month, Uyghur activist Rushan Abbas hoped the summit would bring a breakthrough for her imprisoned sister, who has been detained in a Chinese prison for nearly eight years.

Both the Senate and House passed resolutions just days before Trump’s departure urging him to push for the release of six Chinese Communist Party detainees – including her sister, Dr. Gulshan Abbas.

“I am asking the leader of the free world to look a dictator in the eye and demand the return of my sister, a soul who has been stolen by the machinery of hate,” Rushan Abbas wrote in a May 14 commentary in The Hill.

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“I still believe that the people in the White House and the State Department are still trying everything they can. Not everything is public – there are both public and private conversations,” Abbas told The Diplomat a week after the summit.

Abbas now lives in Falls Church, Virginia, with her five children. She’s one of roughly 12,000 Uyghurs estimated to be living in the United States. Her sister, a retired medical doctor, was arrested days after Abbas spoke about the government’s persecution of Uyghurs at a think tank in Washington.

“It’s really frustrating, but we don’t see any other way but continuing to use our voices on every platform we have to keep reminding Americans and politicians to continue paying attention to this atrocity,” she said.

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“The fact that he [Trump] met with Xi, in spite of the ongoing genocide, is itself the biggest loss for us,” said activist Salih Hudayar, who left his hometown in southern Xinjiang as a child and grew up in Oklahoma. He lost all contact with relatives in China almost a decade ago.

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Since 2017, the Chinese government has reportedly imprisoned more than one million members of Turkic ethnic groups, most of whom are Uyghurs – a mostly Muslim ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. Many have been arbitrarily detained in a network of “re-education camps” in the name of combating extremism, and subjected to forced labor, surveillance, family separation, religious restrictions, and sterilization.

The U.S. State Department declared the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide in 2021, and a United Nations report later determined they could amount to crimes against humanity. Beijing strenuously denies these claims.

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The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act – sponsored by then-Senator Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s secretary of state – became law in 2020, requiring the government to compile reports on the crackdown in Xinjiang, and sanctioning Chinese officials thought to be responsible for human rights abuses there. Two years later, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act came into force, aiming to block the import of goods manufactured through forced labor from Xinjiang. The law also ordered the creation of a list of entities manufacturing merchandise with forced labor.

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Last year, Representatives Chris Smith, a Republican, and Jim McGovern, a Democrat, introduced a Transnational Repression Policy Act. If passed, the bill would give transnational repression an official definition as tactics deployed by foreign governments to “reach beyond their borders to intimidate, silence, harass, coerce, or harm individuals,” including political dissidents, activists and religious and ethnic minority groups.

Several experts said that beyond diplomatic engagement, U.S. authorities should instead prioritize doubling down on the enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. U.S. consumers still find goods made with raw materials sourced from Xinjiang, noted Yaqiu Wang, a fellow at the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations and former director for China research at Freedom House.

Sophie Richardson, former China director at Human Rights Watch, said that members of Congress should refuse to participate in formalities during Xi’s reciprocal visit to Washington in September.

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