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By Sarah E. Makin
Former White House and National Security Council official
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This summer, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri came home. Chinese authorities had arrested the house-church pastor at his home in southern China, and detained him for preaching the gospel. He was released less than two months after President Donald Trump raised his case with Xi Jinping in Beijing and reunited with his family in America. Christians around the world rightly called it a miracle.
It was also a reminder of the job description. God sent His Son “to proclaim liberty to the captives and… to set at liberty those who are oppressed.” (Luke 4:18)
On September 24, President Trump and Xi Jinping meet at the White House. While trade and AI will likely dominate the briefings, political prisoners should not be an afterthought. Pastor Jin’s release showed that when the president puts a name on the table, Beijing can move. The question now is whether we will ask Trump to put more names on that table—including people who are not Christian. This is an opportunity for President Trump to build on his legacy of setting political prisoners free.
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My friend Ziba Murat has spent eight years fighting for her mother, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, a Uyghur physician. Dr. Abbas was seized in Urumqi six days after her sister—an American citizen—spoke in Washington about the Uyghur genocide. Dr. Abbas committed no crime. She was sentenced to 20 years on fabricated charges.
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Her detention is a clear case of transnational repression designed to curb free speech in America. That kind of intimidation by a foreign actor should enrage any American who values our First Amendment rights.
Dr. Abbas has 24 American citizen relatives who want her home. Freeing her would do more than reunite a family. It would send a clear signal to the Chinese Communist Party that it cannot restrict free speech on U.S. soil, silence an entire family, and expect the White House to look away while it talks tariffs.
Pastor Jin’s release gave families like Ziba’s something they had not had in a long time: hope AND proof that pressure works. If Dr. Abbas walks out of prison, she would be the first Uyghur political prisoner freed since the genocide began. That is the kind of deliverable a summit should produce.
Christians should care about Dr. Abbas—and about Tibetan Buddhists, Hong Kongers, Falun Gong practitioners, and every other prisoner of conscience in China—because they, too, are made in the image of God. Hebrews 13:3 does not ask us to remember only the prisoners who share our creed. It asks us to remember those in prison as if we were in prison with them.
The list is longer than one op-ed can carry. The table should have room for more than one name: Pastor Wang Yi, still serving a nine-year sentence for leading an unregistered church; the Panchen Lama, missing since childhood; Zhou Deyong, a Falun Gong practitioner whose wife and son live in the United States. Naming them is not a census. It is a reminder that the silenced are many, and that a summit that starts with Dr. Abbas tells Beijing the list is not closed.
I cannot thank God for Pastor Jin’s freedom and then treat Dr. Abbas as optional. The same God who numbered the hairs on my head numbered hers. If Christ can claim me, I do not get to decide that she is someone else’s problem.
And asking for the release of Dr. Abbas is not a detour from America First. It is how you handle a Communist government that jails people for their faith, punishes American families for speaking up, and then expects us to take its word at the table.
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Advocating for religious freedom is in our national security interest. The same Communist Party that cages a Uyghur doctor and a house-church pastor is testing whether it can intimidate Americans and still sit across from the President as an equal.
The Christian voices that helped free Pastor Jin now have a second assignment. Call the White House. Call your member of Congress. Ask President Trump to make prisoner releases—starting with Dr. Abbas—a condition of the talks, not a courtesy line in a readout. Beijing already knows he can get a pastor out. It should learn he will not stop there.
Securing Dr. Abbas’s release would be a victory for people of every faith the CCP tries to break, and a clear message to Chinese leadership that the U.S. has the upper hand and intends to use it for freedom—not just market access.
Speak up for those who cannot speak. Even if they don’t pray like you.
Sarah E. Makin is a former White House and National Security Council official who served as deputy assistant to the president and senior adviser on International Religious Freedom from 2017-2021. She is a human rights advocate, filmmaker, and runs a strategic advisory firm in Washington, D.C. Follow her on X, @DCSas.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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