China and Economic Espionage

A federal judge has revoked the U.S. citizenship of Li Chen and Yu Zhou, a Chinese married couple who worked at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and were previously convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets for trying to steal cutting‑edge exosome research to commercialize in China. U.S. District Judge James E. Simmons Jr. ruled that those convictions were crimes involving moral turpitude that meant they lacked the “good moral character” required for naturalization, allowing the DOJ to denaturalize them years after they became citizens in 2016 and 2017. Prosecutors say Chen and Zhou used stolen proprietary information to help found a biotech company in China, received funding from China’s State Administration of Foreign Expert Affairs, and earned about $1.5 million from transactions involving the misappropriated intellectual property. Chen was sentenced to 30 months in prison and three years of supervised release and Zhou to 33 months in prison in the underlying criminal case; the new ruling now strips them of citizenship and likely sets up immigration consequences. Attorney General Pam Bondi touted the case as part of a broader push to ensure citizenship “remains a privilege to obtain, not a right to abuse,” a message that is already being amplified in online debates about Chinese espionage, biomedical security and hard‑line immigration enforcement. Civil‑liberties and immigration advocates are warning on social media that denaturalization tied to past conduct could become a powerful, and politically charged, tool in future national‑security and trade‑secret cases.