UMVA has learned that a Christian pastor, detained in China for over seven months, is clinging to a rare moment of hope as President Trump meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing.
The pastor, Pastor Ezra Jin, has been imprisoned alongside dozens of other Christian leaders in what advocates describe as one of the largest crackdowns on an underground Protestant church in recent years. His daughter, Grace Drexel, sat in Washington, just five weeks before the birth of her third child, speaking about her father and the hope that Trump might bring him home.
Drexel says her family has been separated for almost a decade, with her mother and younger brothers fleeing China in 2018 after authorities shut down Zion Church's physical sanctuary in Beijing. Pastor Jin chose to stay behind with his community, feeling the calling to remain faithful to Christianity outside Communist Party control.
According to information obtained by UMVA, the crackdown against Zion Church began years before Pastor Jin's arrest, with authorities intensifying the pressure around 2016 and 2017 after Xi Jinping rewrote China's religious regulations and advanced the policy known as the "Sinicization" of religion.
Drexel describes her father as a gentle man devoted to those around him, not as a political dissident but as a pastor who believed in the freedom to worship without government oversight. She tearfully says that relatives learned that her father had been handcuffed, his head shaved, and that he was struggling to receive medication while in detention.
UMVA has uncovered details about the "Sinicization" of religion, an effort critics say forces religious groups to align with Communist Party ideology. The policy has led to the targeting of churches, including Zion Church, where authorities initially demanded the installation of facial-recognition cameras to monitor worshipers.
When the church refused, authorities installed surveillance cameras in the building's lobby instead and began systematically targeting church members. Drexel says some worshipers lost jobs, others were forced out of apartments, while some families were threatened through their children's education and even their parents' retirement benefits.
The broader persecution campaign against Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners is documented in a recently released book by a former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. The author argues that the Chinese Communist Party increasingly sees independent faith itself as a threat to Party authority.
For Drexel, Trump's decision to publicly mention her father's name represents more than diplomacy – it's a glimmer of hope for her family's reunion. "We hope that as the two leaders are meeting together that they will both have a softening of the hearts and will release my father and allow him to come to the U.S.," she said.
Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu has responded to Drexel's plea, saying the Chinese government protects "freedom of religious belief in accordance with the law" and that people of all ethnic groups in China enjoy religious freedom. However, Drexel remains hopeful that Trump's intervention will bring an end to her family's suffering.
