Foreign governments are weaponizing transnational repression to silence religious dissidents on American soil — a direct threat to U.S. sovereignty, officials and religious freedom advocates warned Tuesday at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C.

Freedom House President Annie Boyajian joined United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz and victims of these attacks to detail how authoritarian regimes extend their reach beyond their borders through surveillance, physical intimidation and violence. The tactics include threatening family members abroad, orchestrating arrests and deportations, and in extreme cases, assassination. (RELATED: US Moves Troops Into Nigeria Amid Escalating Violence Against Christians)

Freedom House documented 1,219 incidents of physical transnational repression by 48 governments across 103 countries between 2014 and 2024 — though Boyajian said the true scale is impossible to measure.

Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who spoke on the panel, exemplifies the cost of speaking out. Turkey’s government placed a bounty on his head after he used his basketball platform to criticize the regime. His father was arrested in retaliation. Freedom hasn’t seen his family in 11 years.

“The hardest thing about going against a dictatorship is what your family has to go through,” Freedom said.

Freedom said he received unwavering support — until he began criticizing China’s human rights abuses. He claims he was effectively blackballed from the league shortly thereafter.

Boyajian confirmed China leads the world in this form of oppression, conducting “the most sophisticated global and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression.” China accounts for 22% of all physical transnational attacks documented by Freedom House, she said.

Mark Yang and Cynthia Sun of the Falun Dafa Information Center told the Daily Caller they’re preparing to publish a nationwide survey on Chinese government attacks against Falun Gong practitioners in the U.S. The Falun Dafa Information Center is the main advocacy organization for Falun Gong practitioners in the West.

Founded in China in 1992, Falun Gong is a spiritual movement that combines meditation and qigong exercises with a syncretic belief system drawing from Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese folk religion. The group attracted tens of millions of followers in the 1990s before Beijing banned it in 1999, viewing its rapid growth and organizational capacity as a political threat.

Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi, teaches that modern science is flawed, promoting traditional Chinese medicine over Western treatments. The movement operates Shen Yun, the touring dance production, and The Epoch Times.

Despite the group’s contentious teachings, the Chinese Communist Party’s response has been brutal. Practitioners have been subjected to “re-education through labor” camps and, according to extensive documentation, forced organ harvesting. Beijing’s campaign against Falun Gong now extends to American soil, where practitioners report ongoing harassment and intimidation. (RELATED: ‘Murder Masquerading As Medicine’: Senate Ignores Bill On CCP’s Christian Organ Harvesting)

Yang and Sun’s forthcoming survey, based on interviews with over 1,000 U.S.-based practitioners across 42 states — the majority American citizens — purportedly found that most reported being watched, while a significant portion said relatives in China faced retaliation for their U.S. activism.

The Chinese government deploys multiple tactics to target Falun Gong practitioners on American campuses and online, Yang and Sun said. At the University of Pennsylvania, Chinese international students launched a petition branding a Falun Gong advocate as racist for hosting events critical of Beijing — part of a broader strategy of weaponizing Western political terminology, Sun said.

“They don’t care about facts,” Sun said. “Just start throwing all those things, all those labels [like ‘racist’ or ‘misogynist’] … they know those things would take the Western mind, you know, and they think that’s something people care about.”

Online, the CCP has allegedly deployed bot networks to spread disinformation about Falun Gong. X removed over 28,000 fake accounts in 2024 that were coordinating attacks on the group, Sun claimed. The operation has also produced AI deepfakes of Falun Gong advocates and offered payments to influencers — including podcaster Tim Pool, who said he declined $200 to read anti-Falun Gong scripts that others accepted.

Documents Yang and Sun say are leaked notes from a  2024 Chinese Ministry of Public Security meeting reveal the scale of Beijing’s strategy. The document calls on agents to “mobilize concealed agents to create and escalate the internal conflicts of Falun Gong, to expand nonstop the fighting strength, depth, and reach of [social media influencers targeting Falun Gong and Shen Yun].”

“They must attract the continuous attention of the entire United States society, and force the U.S. government to strike on all fronts, eliminating the force of Falun Gong,” the leaked notes state.

China isn’t alone. Uyghurs face similar targeting from Beijing, the State Department notes, while governments in Turkey, India, Egypt, Iran, Russia, Uzbekistan, Cambodia and beyond actively deploy transnational repression against diaspora communities, according to Boyajian.

Ambassador Waltz called the practice “wholly unacceptable” and a violation of American sovereignty.

“This has always been and will always be a land of religious freedom,” Waltz said, noting America was founded by religious refugees. “We will not stand for it. We will stand for U.S. sovereignty and for everybody’s right to worship.”