When Joyce Xi attends her commencement at Yale this week, she will join not just the ranks of educated men and women, but a very distinctive subset.
She will be an Asian American who now knows exactly what it’s like to undergo the extreme xenophobia of her own country.
But only as an associate.
She was just collateral damage, the unintended target, in her family’s ordeal.
The main focus was her father, Dr. Xiaoxing Xi, former head of the physics department at Temple University. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, aka the FISA Act, the law reserved to deal with the nation’s most significant terror and security threats, the U.S. government went after Dr. Xi with a vengeance.
If you saw Dr. Xi on 60 Minutes recently, then you saw him re-enact what happened May 21, 2015, when the FBI came pounding on the door of his suburban Philadelphia home.
Armed to the hilt, the agents cuffed and arrested Xi as his family watched in “disbelief.”
