Survivors and Former Envoy Urge Trump to Raise Religious Freedom at Xi Meeting

# What happened

On Sept. 10 in Washington, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback hosted a media briefing with survivors of religious persecution in China. They urged the U.S. president to make religious freedom a central element of the Sept. 24 summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

# Who spoke and why it matters

Brownback framed religious freedom as a core diplomatic issue, not a peripheral human-rights item. He pointed to a broad pattern of state pressure affecting multiple faith groups: Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists.

# First-person accounts cited at the briefing

Gao Pu, identified as the son of Pastor Gao Quanfu, attended the event to highlight that Gao's parents — both reported to be about 70 years old — remain in detention over their religious beliefs.

# Institutional context and U.S. response

U.S. government reporting and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom have documented arrests, imprisonment, forced political indoctrination, and broader efforts to align religious practice with state ideology (often described as "sinicization").

Legislatively, S. 4009 — titled the Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act — has advanced to the Senate legislative calendar, indicating congressional attention to claims of forced organ harvesting tied to prisoners of conscience.

Speakers urged the U.S. administration to raise concrete cases and overall policy at the Sept. 24 meeting. Their requests focused on securing the release of religious prisoners, ending forced labor and abusive detention practices, and stopping alleged medical abuses tied to organ removal.

# Immediate implications

If the White House places religious freedom on the summit agenda, it could elevate individual prisoner cases and broader policy complaints into bilateral discussions that are otherwise dominated by trade, technology, and security issues. The briefing aimed to make it more difficult for such concerns to be sidelined.

# Bottom line

Survivors and a former U.S. official assembled public testimony to press the Trump administration to confront Beijing on religious freedom during the upcoming summit. Their accounts span detention, forced labor, physical torture, and allegations of medical testing linked to organ harvesting. U.S. government reports and pending legislation show those concerns are already part of policy discussions in Washington.