Secretary of State Marco Rubio has promised to be helpful in any way possible to facilitate passage of legislation countering the Chinese regime’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting.
The question came up at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Rubio testified on May 21 about the State Department’s 2026 budget proposal.
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who co-led the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (HR 1503), appealed to Rubio for help.
“You and I have worked on issues like forced organ harvesting,” Smith said to Rubio, noting that the two had co-chaired the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China to work on human rights issues in China.
“[Chinese leader] Xi Jinping is making billions by killing tens of thousands of young people, average age 28 each and every year,” Smith said. “And you know it—you’re the sponsor of the bill.
“If we could get it out of the Senate, it would hopefully clamp down on this egregious human rights abuse in China.
“And it’s a global bill. It would outlaw forced organ harvesting profoundly with real penalties—up to 20 years in prison for those who are part of the supply chain.”
While a Florida senator during the last Congress, Rubio had signed on to the Senate version of Smith’s Act, which aims to sanction perpetrators of the abuse with a civil fine of up to $250,000 and criminal penalties of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison. The bill passed the House on May 7 by a near-unanimous vote, garnering 406 lawmakers’ support.
Rubio, in response, called forced organ harvesting “concerning.”
“We would obviously be helpful in any way we can in helping you pass that in the Senate, certainly putting a good word for it and the like,” he said.
The Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act would sanction anyone implicated in the abuse, including members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by freezing their assets, prohibiting transactions, revoking their visas, and eliminating other immigration benefits.
Rubio was outspoken about the issue as a senator. Last July, he led the Falun Gong Protection Act, which aims to deploy sanction tools to protect the principal victim group of forced organ harvesting, practitioners of the persecuted faith group Falun Gong. The bill also passed the House in May upon reintroduction in the 119th Congress.
In May 2024, Rubio and Smith sent a letter to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking him to set up a reward program to seek firsthand evidence of the Chinese regime’s illicit organ trade.
Smith’s bill would require the United States to make an assessment on forced organ harvesting and trafficking in each foreign country.
“We will task the State Department to look at what’s happening in every country,” and “determine whether or not there’s a forced organ harvesting problem,” Smith told The Epoch Times on the day the House bill was passed.
“But nobody does it worse—nobody—than the People’s Republic of China,” he said.
Smith noted that forced organ harvesting had been going on “far too long,” and without accountability, “it will continue to get worse.”
The act of killing for organs is “right out of Nazi Germany and Joseph Mengele … the cruelty of what he did during the Third Reich,” he said.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that encourages practitioners to abide by the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. It was first introduced to the public in 1992 and grew rapidly in popularity, with official estimates indicating that at least 70 million people picked up the practice in China by 1999.
The CCP viewed the growing popularity of Falun Gong as a challenge to its authoritarian rule and responded by launching a brutal persecution campaign that continues to this day.
In 2019, the China Tribunal in London concluded that the Chinese regime had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners being the “principal source” of organs.
In 2023, Texas became the first U.S. state to enact a law to combat the issue. The law bans health insurance providers from covering organ transplants involving organs sourced from China or any country linked to forced organ harvesting.
Four other U.S. states—Utah, Idaho, Tennessee, and Arizona—have enacted similar laws.
