Chinese American professor wins appeal to continue lawsuit against FBI

Xiaoxing Xi earned his PhD in Beijing, but he built his career in the United States. He arrived in the country in 1989 and worked at several colleges in New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania before arriving at Temple University. By 2015, the physics professor was a respected expert in a cutting-edge field and, as interim head of the physics department, was on the cusp of a big promotion.

So he was stunned to find a team of FBI agents at his Philadelphia home on an early morning in May that year. They arrested him in his pajamas at gunpoint as his family looked on in alarm.

"I opened my door," Xi recalled in an interview. "I realized all my life, everything I have done, is gone."

A Justice Department news release said Xi, a physicist and U.S. citizen of Chinese descent, had delivered confidential technology to China "to assist Chinese entities in becoming world leaders" in the field — an accusation that essentially cast him as a "technological spy," he would later allege. He was interrogated and strip-searched. But the case ended in farce four months later after experts asserted that the government had misunderstood the science behind Xi's work.

Xi's case was dismissed in September of that year, but he said the accusations cost him a senior position in Temple University's physics department and cast a pall over his research and his family's life.

In 2017, Xi sued the U.S. government and leaders of the FBI, Justice Department and National Security Agency for what he alleged to be a willfully negligent prosecution clouded by bias over his Chinese ethnicity. But it languished for years and was later dismissed in federal court. Xi appealed the ruling in 2021.

His lawsuit can now proceed, an appeals court ruled late last month, allowing Xi to continue his longtime quest to tell of his experience in court and join several other researchers of Chinese descent who’ve faced similar accusations.

"Professor Xi and his family have been through hell these past eight years because of the FBI's discriminatory profiling and unconstitutional surveillance," Patrick Toomey, Xi's attorney, said in a statement. "We are heartened that professor Xi and his family will finally have their day in court."

The FBI declined to comment. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

With his arrest, Xi, who received a PhD in physics at Peking University in Beijing before moving to Germany in 1987 and then the United States in 1989, joined a growing group of ethnic Chinese scholars who’ve had charges withdrawn by the Justice Department in the past decade. Critics have accused the government of overreaching in an effort to combat espionage by agents of the Chinese government and instead unduly targeting scholars performing legitimate — and valuable — research in the United States.

Xi was performing such research as interim head of the physics department at Temple when FBI agents rapped on his door on an early morning in May 2015, his lawsuit reads. Xi said the officers arrived at his home with guns and a battering ram and handcuffed him when he answered the door. After being strip-searched and questioned, he was jailed pending his initial appearance in court.

But the case against Xi quickly fell apart. An indictment accused Xi, an expert in superconducting materials, of sharing confidential schematics for a pocket heater, a device used to construct a thin film of a superconducting compound. It cited emails Xi wrote to colleagues at a Shanghai institute in 2010 offering to assist it in building a "tubular heating device." But that device and the applications for it that Xi described in his emails were distinct from the pocket heater, according to Xi's lawsuit.

Xi's lawsuit alleged that the FBI agent who investigated him had spoken to experts and knew of the discrepancies in the case and instead predicated the agency's investigation into Xi on his Chinese ethnicity.

"The whole thing was kind of stupid," Xi said. "And that was exactly what I was thinking about. How can they make it so wrong?"

Xi's lawsuit also alleged that investigators used powerful surveillance techniques to tap the professor's phone and email communications without a proper warrant.

Xi felt little solace when the charges against him were dropped four months after his arrest, he said. The Temple physics department removed him from his interim position after his arrest and from several grant-funded research projects he’d been overseeing. Nor was he compelled to continue with his work — Xi feared further scrutiny if he applied for more federal grant funding, he said.

What Xi felt he could do was bring the government to court. But he faced another setback when his 2017 lawsuit was dismissed in April 2021. Xi appealed in September of that year.

As Xi's appeal was pending, several other scientists of Chinese descent across the United States navigated parallel challenges. An MIT physicist had similar charges against him dropped in January 2022 — and later that year made a major discovery in semiconductor research. A former hydrologist at the National Weather Service won over $1.5 million from the government in November after challenging a 2014 Commerce Department investigation that accused her of espionage.

The Justice Department also cited missteps in February 2022, shuttering the Trump-era China Initiative that launched several flawed cases against ethnic Chinese scholars and saying it had created a "harmful perception" that it was unjustly targeting researchers of Chinese descent.

On May 24, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Xi's case had been wrongly dismissed. It will return to district court around August if the government does not appeal the court's ruling.

Xi remains a professor at Temple, but his ambitions for research have been dampened by the fear of running afoul of the government again, he said. Xi has instead spent his time raising awareness about the targeting of ethnic Chinese scholars — and the damage he says it has done to his fellow researchers and science in the United States. He said he's still eager to bring his story to the courtroom and with it, he hopes, a wider audience.

"Now we’ll put the government under oath to explain what they did," he said.