{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=415218", "Daily Caller article on Smith's Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act'\"Murder Masquerading As Medicine\": Senate Ignores Bill On CCP's Christian Organ Harvesting'", "2025-12-23", "2025", "2025-12", "Republican", "House", "NJ", "Christopher H. Smith", "S000522", "chrissmith.house.gov", "chrissmith", "https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentquery.aspx", "scraper", "By Derek VanBuskirk\n\nPublished December 23, 2025 at 1:08 PM ET\n\nA bill aimed at curbing the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s (CCP) forced organ harvesting of cultural and religious minorities, including Christians, has \u201clanguished\u201d in committee for seven months as Senate leaders have failed to act.\n\nRepublican New Jersey Rep. Christopher Smith, sponsor of the legislation that passed the House with a nearly unanimous vote, told the Daily Caller about the growing threat to Christians in China and the real consequences of delaying Senate action.\n\nH.R. 1503, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2025, is not Smith\u2019s first attempt to confront the practice. A 2023 version of the bill passed the House 413-2 before dying in the same place the current bill now sits: the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.\n\n(Photo by CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images)\n\nSmith chaired his first hearing on forced organ harvesting in 1998, hearing testimony from Chinese security officials. While the practice was once limited in scope, it exploded into a billion-dollar state enterprise following the CCP\u2019s 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong.\n\nFalun Gong, a spiritual practice drawing on Buddhist and Taoist traditions and once widely embraced in China, was the primary early target.\n\nBecause practitioners abstain from tobacco and alcohol, they were considered ideal harvesting candidates, with the average age of those executed and immediately harvested being 28, Smith said.\n\nTaipei, TAIWAN: During a rally joined by thousands of Falun Gong practitioners at Taipei 23 April 2006, four demonstrators play in an action drama against what they said was the Chinese communists\u2019 killing of Falun Gong followers and harvesting of their organs in concentration camps. (Photo: PATRICK LIN/AFP via Getty Images)\n\n\u201cI want to know how long [the patients] have to wait [for a liver transplant].\u201d\n\nDavid Matas and David Kilgour recorded from an undercover conversation they had with a Chinese doctor, as recorded in \u201cBloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe supply of organs we have, we have every day. We do them every day,\u201d the doctor responded.\n\n\u201cWe want fresh, alive ones,\u201d Matas and Kilgour asked.\n\n\u201cThey are all alive, all alive,\u201d the doctor reassured.\n\n\u201cI heard some come from those who practise Falun Gong, those who are very healthy,\u201d Matas and Kilgour said.\n\n\u201cYes, we have. I can\u2019t talk clearly to you over the phone,\u201d the doctor said, before inviting whom he believed was a potential buyer to visit in person.\n\nThis photo taken on June 2, 2019 shows buildings at the Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center, believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, north of Kashgar in China\u2019s northwestern Xinjiang region. (Photo: GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)\n\nSmith, who has held nine hearings on the issue, said detainees\u2019 health was closely monitored to prepare them for execution and the harvesting of up to six vital organs.\n\nA 2024 report from Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) cited several independent sources verifying that Falun Gong often reported that prisoners of conscience were subject to unsolicited, coerced medical exams and blood testing, adding that guards would use organ transplantation to threaten prisoners who would not comply.\n\nAlthough reliable data is difficult to obtain, DAFOH also found that Chinese organ transplant numbers were reported irregularly, as sudden increases were followed by decade-long standstills, contrasting the steady increase of other countries.\n\nFor example, DAFOH found that Chinese annual transplant numbers increased by 250% between 2000 and 2004, which contrasts with the rates of other countries, ranging from 10-15% during the same time period.\n\n\u201cThey have perfected this art form of killing and stealing organs,\u201d Smith told the Caller.\n\nWASHINGTON, DC \u2013 NOVEMBER 19: U.S. House Speaker Emerita Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (2nd L) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) (3rd L) join (L-R) Policy and Advocacy Coordinator of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation Frances Hui, Research and Policy Advisor of the Hong Kong Watch Anouk Wear, Executive Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council Anna Kwok, Senior International Advocacy Associate of the Hong Kong Democracy Council Carmen Lau during a news conference in response of the sentencing ruling in the Hong Kong 47 case November 19, 2024 in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)\n\nIn a 2024 written testimony, researcher Ethan Gutmann estimated that annual victims may number between 25,000 and 50,000, suggesting as many as 175,000 victims even under lower estimates.\n\nOfficials-turned-witnesses testified in Smith\u2019s hearings that they personally harvested organs from living patients to maximize quality.\n\nSmith said the motive goes beyond profit, serving the party\u2019s pursuit of practical immortality.\n\nWhen a member of the CCP\u2019s totalitarian leadership needs an organ, prisoners\u2019 medical records are searched. If a match is found, the individual is killed for the benefit of the party \u2014 or, more accurately, the men running it, Smith said.\n\nSmith cited a September hot-mic exchange between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping discussing harvesting in this manner.\n\n\u201cEarlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child,\u201d Xi said through a translator, according to The Epoch Times.\n\n\u201cAs biotechnology advances, human organs can be continuously transplanted, allowing us to become younger and younger, perhaps even achieve immortality,\u201d Putin reportedly replied.\n\nIn this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, (L-R) Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin walks with China\u2019s President Xi Jinping and North Korea\u2019s leader Kim Jong Un before a military parade marking the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan and the end of World War II, in Beijing\u2019s Tiananmen Square on September 3, 2025. (Photo by ALEXANDER KAZAKOV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)\n\nSmith called the practice \u201cmurder masquerading as medicine.\u201d\n\nAfter decades of rapid harvesting, Smith said healthy Falun Gong candidates were depleted, forcing the party to expand into \u201calternative\u201d supply sources, including Uyghur Muslims, Kazakhs, other Central Asians and Christians.\n\nChristians\u2019 health and \u201cpure lives,\u201d Smith said, make them highly valuable \u201ccommodities.\u201d\n\nWhile Christians currently represent a \u201csmaller portion\u201d of victims, Smith warned they could become increasingly targeted as other populations are exhausted, serving as a fresh resource for an \u201cever-expanding\u201d enterprise.\n\nReligious persecution is routine in China. Smith told the Caller that Beijing licenses clergy, edits holy scriptures, censors online worship, bars minors from religious life and restricts contact with fellow believers abroad, adding that \u201cthe end goal is eradication.\u201d\n\nA Catholic worshipper prays during an Easter Sunday mass at a prayer house in a village near Beijing on April 4, 2021. (Photo by JADE GAO/AFP via Getty Images)\n\nThough most harvesting occurs in China, H.R. 1503 targets the global organ trade, including Western participants in \u201ctransplant tourism.\u201d\n\nThe U.S. is no exception. Wealthy American patients, Smith said, are willing to pay steep fees to bypass transplant waitlists, funding China\u2019s system in the process.\n\nSmith is not proposing a new approach but expanding a proven one. By attaching organ harvesting to the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, the same framework used against Ghislaine Maxwell, he aims to signal that the FBI will treat transplant tourists and brokers like sex traffickers.\n\nThe goal is to make the risk \u2014 up to 20 years in federal prison and a $1 million fine for those prosecuted in the U.S. \u2014 so high that U.S. demand collapses.\n\nThe bill would also impose asset freezes, sanctions, and travel bans on foreign participants of the underground market.\n\n\u201cMaybe it deters it, and after a few prosecutions, it begins to make a real serious impact,\u201d Smith said. \u201cYou start prosecuting people, and at least it will dry up people utilizing this tainted supply chain.\u201d\n\nH.R. 1503 passed the House 406-1 under suspension of the rules, a process reserved for broadly nonpartisan legislation.\n\nThe sole dissenting vote came from Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Smith said votes no on almost everything.\n\nAs 2025 draws to a close, the bill remains stalled in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Republican Idaho Sen. Jim Risch.\n\nWASHINGTON, DC \u2013 MARCH 25: Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) arrives for the confirmation hearing for former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on March 25, 2025 in Washington, DC. Huckabee, the former governor and presidential candidate, answered questions on Israel and its campaign against Hamas. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)\n\n\u201cI appreciate Rep. Smith\u2019s attention to this horrific issue,\u201d a committee spokesperson told the Caller. \u201cSenator Risch remains committed to countering the dreadful practice of organ harvesting and is happy to work with anyone to counter it. However, this particular piece of legislation has not been raised with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.\u201d\n\nWhile any member may request consideration, only the chairman controls the agenda. That leaves the responsibility ultimately on Risch to get the bill out of what Smith called the legislative black hole of referred-but-ignored legislation \u2014 the same fate as his 2023 effort.\n\nIf Gutmann\u2019s estimates are accurate, between 68,000 and 136,000 people have been killed since the 2023 bill reached the committee, with 15,000 to 31,211 victims since the 2025 bill was referred in June.\n\nWithout action, the Chinese regime and its allies may seek to further expand the practice, and as reserves of Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims are depleted, the CCP may turn to massacring even more Christians to maintain profits.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T20:09:11Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=415218"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.8955191373825073, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}