House lawmakers are raising concerns about increased reports of Chinese spying near U.S. military bases.
Americans were alarmed earlier this year when a Chinese spy balloon was shot down over U.S. soil, but that is far from China’s only efforts to collect information on the U.S.
The nation uses intellectual property theft and cyber attacks to gather intel, and recently more evidence of physical evidence-gathering has come to light.
House Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., and Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Chairman Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., sent a letter to Department of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The letter is demanding answers about a series of reported attempts by Chinese nationals to actually enter U.S. military bases.
The lawmakers pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal report that Chinese nationals have tried to access U.S. bases and been detected about 100 times.
“The PRC’s National Intelligence Law requires that Chinese nationals support, assist, and cooperate with Chinese intelligence officials, even while abroad,” the Republican-led committee said in its announcement. “This obligation placed upon Chinese nationals raises concerns about whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) compels its citizens to gather intelligence while in the United States. In 2021, a Chinese company also purchased land around Grand Forks Air Force Base prompting DOD to require U.S. government approval for foreign nationals to purchase property within 100 miles of certain military instillations.”
In the letter, the lawmakers pointed to “the conviction of a Chinese national for trespassing at Mar-A-Lago, the arrest of two U.S. Navy sailors accused of spying for China, the closure of a secret Chinese intelligence ‘police station’ in New York City, and the downing of the Chinese Spy Balloon over South Carolina in February…”
As The Center Square previously reported, national security experts have raised the alarm that the millions of illegal immigrants that have entered the U.S. in recent years could pose a national security risk. Chinese nationals can come as tourists, legal immigrants or come across the border illegally.
Federal data shows that hundreds of suspected terrorists were caught trying to enter the country in the last year.
The elevated figure does not include the terror suspects who illegally entered the country and evaded arrest, normally called “gotaways.” There have also been millions of “gotaways” in recent years.
“Some of those ‘gotaways’ are undoubtedly from adversarial countries, like China,” Lora Ries, former acting deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, told The Center Square in August. “The number of Chinese nationals encountered at the border has more than doubled since 2020. Meanwhile, the CCP has tried repeatedly to spy on Americans and a Chinese-owned lab was discovered in California harboring dangerous bioweapons.”
A Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report released in June showed the dysfunction at the border. The report said that border patrol agents caught and released a migrant into the U.S. even though the migrant was on the terror watch list.
“This occurred because CBP’s ineffective practices and processes for resolving inconclusive matches with the Terrorist Watchlist led to multiple mistakes,” the report said. “For example, CBP sent a request to interview the migrant to the wrong email address, obtained information requested by the [FBI Terrorism Screening Center] but never shared it, and released the migrant before fully coordinating with the TSC.”
