From an ACLU Press Release – February 8, 2022
Professor Xiaoxing Xi and his family today filed the opening brief in their appeal against the U.S. government and the FBI agent involved in wrongly investigating and prosecuting him. In May 2015, armed FBI agents stormed into Professor Xi’s home outside Philadelphia and arrested him in front of his wife and daughters for supposedly sharing sensitive technology with scientists in China. The government cast Professor Xi, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen and a world-renowned expert on superconductor technologies based at Temple University, as a technological spy. It threatened him with 80 years in prison and $1 million in fines. But the government’s accusations were false and the charges against the professor were dropped four months later.
As previously reported here in April of 2021
On April 1, U.S. District Judge Barclay Surrick threw out a lawsuit that was brought by the ACLU on behalf of Xi Xiaoxing that claimed that the FBI wrongly accused him of espionage.
Xi is a Chinese-born, naturalized American citizen who is a physics professor at Temple University. He lives in Penn Valley.
District Court Judge Barclay Surrick said at the time – Xi’s claims involved judgments and decisions about the investigation and prosecution that are matters of discretion, and that his constitutional rights were not violated. What happened to Xi and his family is very unfortunate,” Surrick wrote. Nevertheless, it is the obligation of this court to simply apply the law as it presently exists to the facts.
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