GOP Sen. Marshall proposes FBI hotline to report CCP 'police stations' inside U.S.
Marshall's bill would further make it a felony to carry out such operations and impose a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall on Tuesday introduced legislation to create an FBI hotline in which callers may report information pertaining to any illicit "police stations" operated by the Chinese Communist Party on U.S. soil.
Alleged CCP "police stations" have attracted scrutiny in recent months. FBI agents aided an office building in New York's Chinatown late last year that allegedly contained such an operation. It is one of more than 100 such facilities worldwide that authorities suspect carry out policing without jurisdiction. Chinese officials have described them as "overseas police service centers."
"The Chinese Communist Party is the greatest geo-political threat to our nation. Any actor committing surveillance, targeting, or spying of individuals on U.S. soil on behalf of the CCP must be prosecuted," Marshall said in a press release announcing the legislation. "We will not tolerate any CCP operative undermining American law and order. This hotline will allow us to intervene and hopefully end the CCP’s unlawful ‘policing’ in the U.S."
"The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shall establish a hotline to receive anonymous tips about any person who is, on behalf of the Government of China or the Chinese Communist Party, surveilling, harassing, intimidating, or coercing another person, or performing law enforcement activities, in the United States, including by coercing current or former Chinese nationals to return to China," the bill reads.
Marshall's bill would further make it a felony to carry out such operations and impose a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
His move comes amid mounting bipartisan wariness of CCP activities within the U.S. In recent weeks Congress has proposed legislation to ban CCP-linked organizations from buying U.S. farmland and to restrict the use of social media platform TikTok.
Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.