The Bitter Irony of Transnational Repression in America

When it comes to the lumbering and cumbersome bureaucracies of the US federal government, it’s always big news when a department or agency gets a renovation or major update to its website. This could partially explain the somewhat strange enthusiasm with which Special Agent in Charge James Dennehy informed an audience of Princeton students last November that the FBI had recently revamped its website to more accurately reflect what the Bureau currently perceives as the most serious and tangible threats to law, order, and American domestic tranquility in the present day. In particular, SAC Dennehy noted that the website had given special priority to a newly emergent threat which had come to menace not American citizens, but foreign nationals who find themselves targeted while on US soil. That’s right: transnational repression had finally gotten its own tab.

In recent years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has made a point of, well, investigating instances of what it views as increasingly frequent and brazen attempts by foreign governments to repress their citizens far beyond the bounds of their own national borders. The shiny new ‘Transnational Repression’ tab on the FBI’s website defines the practice simply as “when foreign governments stalk, intimidate, or assault people in the United States,” and it keeps a running account of the number of people it has arrested or charged with transnational repression: at least 12 in 2020, 13 in 2021, and 32 in 2022. From the efforts of the prosecutors responsible for filing those charges, to those of the poor web developer tasked with designing a rigid and serious-looking website that simultaneously strives to be hip and cool for the kids, to those of the two FBI agents who drove all the way down to Princeton from Newark to speak about the issue, it’s clear that the FBI is devoting a significant portion of its attention to combating and raising awareness around transnational repression.

There are a number of ironies involved in this change of policy on the part of the FBI. To begin with, it is striking (though perhaps not surprising) that the FBI seems to have decided that the best way to combat transnational repression, in order to protect the citizens of other countries, is (you guessed it) to arrest and incarcerate the citizens of other countries. Of the 57 indictments, arrests, and charges reported on the FBI’s website (many of which, upon closer inspection, involve the same individuals who have simply been charged more than once—apparently the FBI feels the need to overexaggerate its record), all but five were nationals of, or emigrants from, foreign countries.

What’s truly remarkable, though, is that only the nationals of countries opposed to the US-led international order seem to attract the attention of federal prosecutors. The vast majority of transnational repression cases involve citizens of the People’s Republic of China, but a significant number of Iranians are also represented on the FBI’s self-reported list of accomplishments. (North Korea would probably be on this list as well, as the country has a clear interest in silencing its dissenters abroad, if it didn’t already have a hard enough time developing a missile capable of reaching the US mainland.)

Meanwhile, the federal government’s inaction has been palpable in regards to the transnational repression committed by the Kagame regime in Rwanda, an increasingly important US partner in sub-Saharan Africa which in 2020 abducted and imprisoned Paul Rusesabagina, a permanent resident of the US who had achieved quasi-celebrity status for sheltering people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. And let’s not forget the Biden administration’s recent response to the transnational murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian assassins in Istanbul in 2018, for which Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was rewarded with a fist bump from the President of the United States.

Regarding the FBI’s attempt to bring public awareness to its new emphasis on targeting and stamping out transnational repression, it is entirely possible that the discrepancy in representation between the countries which have historically been the most notorious perpetrators of transnational repression, such as Rwanda and Saudi Arabia, and the countries viewed by the Washington foreign policy establishment as the greatest threats to US national security, such as China and Iran, is due to more than the federal government’s longtime habit of turning a blind eye to all but the worst human rights violations committed by its allies and partners abroad. After all, countries dependent on foreign aid or military support from the West are admittedly unlikely to jeopardize that relationship by conducting covert operations to spy on, kidnap, or kill their citizens on American soil.

It should raise an eyebrow, however, that the US has so far been willing to press charges only against Chinese and Iranian nationals. Arresting and imprisoning the citizens of foreign adversaries to use as diplomatic bargaining chips is not an unprecedented tactic when it comes to twenty-first century international affairs; one need only look to recent prisoner-swaps between China and Canada in 2021, and the US and Russia in 2022, to see this sort of politics in action.

Interestingly, each of the five American citizens implicated in cases of transnational repression have connections to law enforcement. This includes an NYPD officer, an ex-NYPD officer, an ex-prison guard, as well as an officer and another ex-officer from the Department of Homeland Security (yet more glowing testaments to the trustworthiness and incorruptibility of American law enforcement).

This points to a second irony implicated by the FBI taking such a hard line against transnational repression. For an organization ostensibly committed to protecting the rights of foreign nationals living in the US, the FBI has historically carried out a shocking number of repressive actions against American citizens, particularly against racial minorities and leftist groups across the country.

The most well-known examples of this repressive tendency are striking. The first Japanese-Americans to be preemptively imprisoned after the US entry into WWII were “suspected subversives” who the FBI had been monitoring long before the bombing at Pearl Harbor. The FBI conducted surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr. for years, wiretapping his phones in attempts to gain information with which King could be discredited or blackmailed, and even sent him a letter urging him to kill himself. And within the FBI’s COINTELPRO division (coincidentally, the webpage on transnational repression falls under the ‘Counterintelligence’ tab), agents were directed to infiltrate and sow discord within leftist organizations and movements such as the Communist Party, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the New Left.

Unsurprisingly, the FBI’s own official history acknowledges hardly any of these unsavory aspects of its past, even though it continues to employ similar tactics against leftist and racial justice groups in the present day. For instance, it was recently discovered that during the George Floyd protests of summer 2020, the FBI embedded an informant within the Black Lives Matter movement in Denver, Colorado, who not only spied on BLM activists but also encouraged them to purchase weapons and transition to a strategy of violent protest. That these J. Edgar Hoover-esque plots to disrupt and repress racial justice movements are still going on behind the closed doors of FBI offices throughout the country is frankly an embarrassment, and should completely delegitimize the FBI’s self-declared commitment to protecting the “individual rights and freedoms” of anyone in the US, regardless of their nationality.

By far the most obvious irony inherent to the FBI’s efforts to investigate cases of transnational repression, however, is the fact that the single most prolific and brazen perpetrator of transnational repression in the world over the last 70 years has not been China, or Iran, or North Korea, or even the USSR/Russia, but rather the United States government. Unfortunately, there is not room enough in this issue to provide a full account of the range of US activities abroad that have resulted in either the direct (by US forces) or indirect (by US support for brutal dictators) repression of people living in other countries. Suffice it to say that the history of US foreign relations since the end of WWII is in large part a history of transnational repression by an informal empire whose tentacles stretch all across the globe.

The highlights of this history are illustrative. In Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1973), and Argentina (1976), the US funded and/or equipped coups which brought repressive authoritarian regimes into power. Whenever coups have been insufficient to accomplish the ends of American foreign policy, the US has resorted to more direct repression by simply invading the country in question. Thus Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and others have all fallen victim to American disregard for the most basic rights in the international system, sovereignty and self-determination. Even today, as part of its never-ending global war on terrorism, the US military reserves the unlimited right to use drone strikes to kill anyone that the president deems to pose a significant enough threat to American national security.

In this sense, the transnational repression that occurs in the US today is not all that different from what the US government—specifically the military and the CIA—has been doing around the world for the last 70 years. Apparently America doesn’t like the taste of its own medicine. Who would?

There is one last irony to note. The FBI is wise enough to recognize that the work it does is more retributive than preventative—more akin to slapping a bandage on the problem than actually addressing its root causes. Thus Special Agent in Charge Dennehy proposed a deterrent solution to the issue of transnational repression; in order to effectively dissuade other countries from daring to conduct their repression on American soil, the US government must take a stronger stand against repression all over the world, and in so doing commit to being a more active and consistent supporter of human rights on the global stage.I won’t pretend to know whether or not such a strategy would truly be effective in the long run. All I would argue is that when the FBI is criticizing the rest of the US government for failing to take human rights seriously enough, something somewhere must have gone horribly wrong.