{"id":7940,"date":"2022-12-13T12:57:34","date_gmt":"2022-12-13T17:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/?p=7940"},"modified":"2022-12-13T12:57:34","modified_gmt":"2022-12-13T17:57:34","slug":"a-historic-settlement-for-sherry-chen-against-u-s-governments-wrongful-prosecutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/2022\/12\/a-historic-settlement-for-sherry-chen-against-u-s-governments-wrongful-prosecutions\/","title":{"rendered":"A Historic Settlement for Sherry Chen Against U.S. Government’s Wrongful Prosecutions**"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Background of Sherry Chen:<\/span><\/strong> Sherry Chen was a hydrologist working at the Wilmington, Ohio office of the National Weather Service (NWS). NWS is an agency in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the federal government’s Department of Commerce. The NWS is the world’s largest weather organization, employing approximately 4,700 persons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After moving to the U.S. for additional education, she worked for a number of years in the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Then she started working for NWS in March 2007. Chen’s primary work was to develop, model, and significantly improfe flood prediction for over 2,000 miles along the Ohio River and its tributories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Accusations Against Sherry Chen:<\/span><\/strong> In October 2014, the FBI came to her workplace and took her away in handcuffs in front of her co-workers to the shock and surprise of her colleagues. She was charged with making false statements to federal investigators and downloading data from a restricted government database in relation to a trip to visit family in China in 2012. And a month after her arrest, she was suspended from her job without pay. Chen said that she had accessed only publicly available information to help a former classmate. In March 2015, federal prosecutors dropped all changes without any explanation. Nevertheless, in March 2016, she was fired from her job as a hydrologist with the NWS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 2012, the Commerce Department’s internal security unit, the Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) began unlawfully investigating Ms. Chen as part of a broad pattern of discrimination directed at Chinese Americans, leading to her baseless arrest and prosecution by the FBI and Justice Department. ITMS was officially disbanded last year, following a Senate report detailing how the unit had become a “rogue, unaccountable police force” that operated outside the law and “opened frivolous investigations on a variety of employees without evidence suggesting wrongdoing.” <\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After being fired from the job she had worked at for years, a federal administrative judge found that her termination by the NWS and NOAA was unlawful, and that Ms. Chen had been the victim of a “gross injustice.” After the government appealed, she was placed on indefinite leave, instead of being fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sherry Chen’s Lawsuit Against the U.S. Government:<\/span><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Chen asked herself “why do I have to accept the unfair and unjust treatment my government has given me? I am not just fighting for myself but for all victims of racial profiling so that it won’t happen again.” So around 2018 she filed a complaint for wrongful termination with the Merit System Protection
Board (MSPB). The MSPB was established to protect federal workers against abuses by their employers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, the settlement of that lawsuit was announced on November 10, 2022 at the time during the “International Society for the Study of Oversea Chinese” (ISSCO) conference in San Francisco. The results of the settlement include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n