{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=415853", "The Epoch Times article on Smith hearing'Families Call for Release of Loved Ones in China as Xi Visits US'", "2026-09-23", "2026", "2026-09", "Republican", "House", "NJ", "Christopher H. Smith", "S000522", "chrissmith.house.gov", "chrissmith", "https://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentquery.aspx", "scraper", "By Eva Fu\n\nPublished September 23, 2026\n\nWASHINGTON\u2014These are the faces that Beijing doesn\u2019t want the world to see.\n\nThey are political prisoners, ranging in age from their early 20s to nearly 80, each held behind bars because their beliefs or speech do not align with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).\n\nEach of them is a father or a mother, a son or a daughter. In the United States and elsewhere, someone is thinking of them, waiting for the day they will be allowed to go home.\n\nAmong those waiting are a mother of an 8-year-old, and a daughter undergoing chemotherapy, wishing to hold her father\u2019s hand.\n\nAs the U.S.\u2013China summit looms over Washington, advocates see an opening to make that happen.\n\nOne phone call to Beijing from the Oval Office, they argue, and these detainees could walk free.\n\nOn Capitol Hill, the plight of the political prisoners has galvanized bipartisan lawmakers ahead of the bilateral talks.\n\nHouse Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said at a presser that he believes the \u201crelease of the hostages\u201d is on the agenda.\n\nFive Democratic lawmakers have also presented the president with the names of 22 prisoners he could bring up with Chinese counterparts.\n\nRep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) hosted two hearings this month championing their cause.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s like that could be me. That could be my wife if she lives in China,\u201d he told The Epoch Times.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re all God\u2019s children. If we don\u2019t raise [this cause], who will?\u201d\n\nButterfly in the Kitchen\n\nOn the kitchen counter of her Florida home, Ziba Murat keeps an embroidered image of a swallowtail butterfly.\n\nIt\u2019s a small, tangible piece of Gulshan Abbas, Murat\u2019s reticent mother, who\u2019s now in Chinese jail under a 20-year sentence on terrorism-related charges. The United States has deemed those accusations as unfounded.\n\nZiba Murat holds a photo of her mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, at Murat's home in Virginia in 2024.\n\nZiba Murat keeps a framed image of a butterfly that was cross-stitched by her mother, jailed political prisoner Dr. Gulshan Abbas, in her kitchen.\n\nIt was hard for Murat to connect the person she knows so intimately with the reality of life in prison. Abbas, as Murat remembers, smiled quietly at jokes and embroidered for hours with a patience Murat never possessed.\n\nEven after retiring, Abbas continued to go out of her way to help Uyghur patients, getting up early to meet them at the hospital just so they could see the right doctor and have everything they needed, Murat told The Epoch Times.\n\nMurat misses her. She misses her mother\u2019s humming in the kitchen and the wonderful stir-fries she cooked during the months she spent visiting the United States.\n\nWhen it was time for Abbas to leave in 2016, Murat wanted her to stay.\n\nShe remembers her mother telling her: \u201cI have a 10-year-visa. I can come back anytime I want.\u201d\n\nMurat said she had a sinking feeling as she watched her mother disappear through airport security. That was the last time they saw each other in person.\n\n(L\u2013R) Ziba Murat; her mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas; and her younger sister Zamira Murat during a 2015 visit to the United States by Abbas, in this file photo.\n\nFor the next two years, the two talked on the phone every day. Then in 2018, days after Abbas\u2019s sister Rushan made a public speech denouncing the Party\u2019s mass detention of Uyghurs, Abbas became unreachable. It took two years for her family to learn of her imprisonment and sentencing in a secret trial.\n\nHolding her baby daughter, Murat walked around Congress frantically looking for help. Never a news junkie, she became glued to the screen, scanning for the slightest hint of change in U.S.\u2013China policy.\n\nGuilt gnawed at Murat as she wondered what she could have done, thinking about how she was here in the United States living her life while her mother was suffering in a Chinese jail.\n\nMurat still can\u2019t bring herself to tell the truth to her 8-year-old daughter.\n\nWhen the girl saw a photo of Rushan holding a photo of Abbas, she asked Murat what was going on.\n\nMurat responded that her grandmother was \u201cvery far away\u201d and that they were asking people to bring her back.\n\nThrough all these years, Murat said, the girl hasn\u2019t hugged her grandmother. She knows her grandmother through stories, photographs, and the hope that one day they will finally meet.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s the cruelty of transnational repression,\u201d Murat said at a Sept. 16 event on China\u2019s religious freedom. \u201cIt did not harm only one person. It steals birthdays. It steals holidays, ordinary family moments that you can never get back.\u201d\n\nDr. Gulshan Abbas's image is shown during a congressional hearing by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party titled \u201cThe Chinese Communist Party's Ongoing Uyghur Genocide,\u201d in Washington on March 23, 2023.\n\nZiba Murat with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) during a visit for the State of the Union address in Washington on Feb. 24, 2026.\n\nZiba Murat with Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), head of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, in Washington in March 2026.\n\nA Card From Jail\n\nAlisa Zhou experienced that cruelty when she was around 7 years old.\n\nIt was 2000, one year after the Chinese regime went all out against her faith, Falun Gong.\n\nThe meditative practice spread widely by word of mouth in the 1990s, reaching an estimated 70 million practitioners by decade\u2019s end. Then, in 1999, the Chinese leadership ordered a full-fledged eradication campaign. Overnight, the practitioners became outlaws.\n\nZhou was too young to make sense of it all, and her father tried to shield her from the hard reality. When her mother, Wang Youmei, vanished suddenly, he told Zhou that she had gone on a business trip far away.\n\nBut the persecution found a way to reach Zhou. After her mother\u2019s arrest, Zhou\u2019s best friend, with whom she walked to and from school every day, stopped playing with her. Then her father took her to an unfamiliar place.\n\nHer mother was there. She handed Zhou a bag of snacks and a handwritten card.\n\nOne message is etched into her memory: her mother\u2019s wish that her children \u201cgrow up healthy and happy.\u201d\n\nThe young Zhou cried as she took in the words. Some time later, she grasped that her mother was in jail.\n\nThere were a lot more tears during those nights when Zhou was alone. To encourage herself, she wrote down \u201ctruthfulness, compassion, and forbearance\u201d\u2014the three core principles of Falun Gong\u2014and hung it on her bedroom wall.\n\nMore than two decades later, the same three words keep Zhou going after her mother\u2019s fifth arrest this April.\n\nShe had learned about it while driving to Virginia Beach for a weekend retreat. Back at work on Monday, she burst into tears when her boss greeted her with \u201cHow was your weekend?\u201d\n\nZhou is now an American citizen. But despite living in the free world, the persecution follows her like a shadow, she said.\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s not a moment where I can shake it off,\u201d she told The Epoch Times. Whenever she trawls the internet for information on China, she\u2019s haunted by revelations of new arrests and deaths.\n\nBelieving in truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance poses no threat to anyone, Zhou said, but if the CCP is out to get someone, \u201cthere\u2019s no shortage of excuses.\u201d She said she can\u2019t fathom how a state could turn on its own people.\n\nNeither can Smith, the co-chair of the bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China that monitors human rights in the communist country.\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve been in Congress for 46 years. I don\u2019t get it,\u201d he said.\n\n\u201cThese [people] are assets to your country. ... This is the salt of the earth\u2014Christian believers, Falun Gong practitioners, the Uyghurs, Tibetan Buddhists. Why would you look to hurt these people?\n\n\u201cLet them thrive, and your nation thrives.\u201d\n\nTo Hold a Daughter\u2019s Hand\n\nIt\u2019s difficult to know how many political prisoners there are in China. The Chinese regime doesn\u2019t provide such information and asserts that it doesn\u2019t hold them.\n\nA database from human rights nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation, last updated in December 2025, recorded more than 50,000 entries. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China has tracked more than 11,000 cases. Neither comes close to the true number, advocates say.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s millions of people that have to go through that,\u201d Sam Brownback, former ambassador at large for international religious freedom, told The Epoch Times. \u201cThese are people that have families like I do, and they\u2019ve just done what they believe is right and stood up for freedom.\u201d\n\nIn Hong Kong, the number of political prisoners has also been rising over the six years since Beijing imposed a national security law to crush dissent.\n\nOne of the most prominent is Jimmy Lai, founder of one of the largest pro-democracy newspapers in Hong Kong, which folded following a 500-strong police raid in 2021.\n\nHis daughter Claire was diagnosed with cancer weeks ago and just started chemotherapy in London.\n\nLai received the news at the maximum-security prison where he\u2019s serving a 20-year sentence.\n\nAt a Sept. 16 hearing highlighting Lai\u2019s case, Claire\u2019s brother Sebastien pleaded for compassionate release so that their father could \u201csit beside his daughter in her hardest moment\u201d and hold her hand.\n\n\u201cShe wants nothing more than to have him with her for this fight,\u201d Sebastien Lai said.\n\nSebastien Lai said he hears about his father\u2019s health declining every single day.\n\nIn a report two days before the hearing, the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation found that Hong Kong prison guards have rehearsed Jimmy Lai\u2019s death.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s really scary to hear,\u201d Sebastien Lai said.\n\nThe Hong Kong authorities\u2019 actions against his father are a \u201creal disgrace,\u201d he said. \u201cThey went through all this kangaroo court show trial and found nothing. His record is unblemished, yet they still keep going.\u201d\n\nThe Long Game\n\nJimmy Lai is one of an estimated 2,000 Hong Kong pro-democracy figures ensnared under the national security law.\n\nFormer student leader Joshua Wong is currently awaiting sentencing for \u201cforeign collusion\u201d for lobbying Western lawmakers, and potentially faces life in prison.\n\nFor democracy activist Frances Hui, who has a HK$1 million (about $127,000) bounty on her head, the word that comes to mind is \u201chorror.\u201d\n\n\u201cI knew [Wong] when he was 16; I don\u2019t know if he will ever come out alive, or if I will ever be able to see him,\u201d she told The Epoch Times.\n\nWong was already serving a four-year, eight-month prison term. Seven months before Wong was due to be released, prosecutors began a second trial.\n\n\u201cThey waited until the very end to come up with this charge. It\u2019s just so apparent that they are trying to keep him behind bars for as long as they can,\u201d Hui said.\n\nThe two met when they were both teenagers campaigning for Hong Kong\u2019s democratic freedoms. Wong, in Hui\u2019s telling, had a lot of energy, taking interviews even while on hunger strike and physically frail.\n\n\u201cHe inspires so many of us,\u201d Hui said, suggesting that the Party authorities are acting out of fear.\n\n\u201cThey are afraid that if he gets out next year, he will create something that they can\u2019t control.\u201d\n\nThe regime is playing the long game, she said, betting that over time, the outside world will \u201cforget the prisoners as they slowly go quiet.\u201d\n\nThe families of the prisoners fear forgetting, too.\n\nAt a recent human rights panel, Uyghur lawyer Rayhan Asat held up a photo of her brother, Ekpar, who was detained upon returning from a 2016 U.S. exchange program.\n\nThey had seen each other that March. She was studying at Harvard Law School and expecting to see him at her graduation ceremony in two months. She regrets not taking many videos of them together. After 10 years of separation, it\u2019s now difficult to imagine what he sounds like.\n\n\u201cThat\u2019s a very painful thought,\u201d she said.\n\nHope for a Miracle\n\nThe release of Pastor Ezra Jin in July is helping to keep their hopes alive.\n\nAfter nearly nine months in custody, the Zion Church leader walked onto a plane bound for the United States and was reunited with his family.\n\nChinese authorities charged him with fraud and illegal business operations\u2014allegations frequently used to prosecute religious activities in China. They told him they could imprison him for 15 years but would be lenient if he pleaded guilty. He refused.\n\nOn July 3, he was pulled from prison and sent in an empty train car to the airport. Even after stepping onto the plane, Jin said, he had no idea where he was going. He had no paperwork or visa.\n\nHe arrived on July 4\u2014America\u2019s 250th birthday. It felt like a dream. The previous day, he was a prisoner. The following evening, he was sitting by the seaside, watching fireworks with family he hadn\u2019t seen in eight years.\n\nMany had thought it was mission impossible, he said, as he accepted an award in July celebrating his freedom. He thanked Trump and many human rights advocates for their support.\n\n\u201cWhen we stand together, changes do happen,\u201d he said.\n\nThis article was published on September 23, 2026 and can be found online at:", 1, "2026-09-24T09:44:48Z", "2026-09-24T09:45:52Z"]], "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=415853"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.6622080691158772, "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"}