espionage
EXCLUSIVE: Chinese ‘Cyber Police’ Agent Runs Online Network Helping Illegal Immigrants Flood Into US
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
“We’re allowing an element that is completely beyond our law to be established firmly as a beachhead in the United States of America, and the people of America are going to pay a severe price, much worse than we are paying even now”
A private social network run by a self-identified Chinese government agent provides illegal immigrants with resources to get into the U.S. and evade border authorities, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation discovered.
The American Self-Guided Tour Channel is a Chinese-language group with over 8,000 members on the encrypted instant messaging platform Telegram that serves as both a forum for discussing Chinese illegal immigration and a hub for documents detailing specific routes to the U.S., a DCNF review of the channel found.
Documents in the Telegram channel translated by the DCNF identify U.S. border wall gaps, instruct Chinese nationals on how to answer questions from Border Patrol agents and provide scripts for requesting asylum.
Furthermore, the channel is overseen by an individual who spreads Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, bans accounts who fail to toe the Party line and identifies himself as a Chinese police officer.
“We’re allowing an element that is completely beyond our law to be established firmly as a beachhead in the United States of America, and the people of America are going to pay a severe price, much worse than we are paying even now,” North Carolina Republican Rep. Dan Bishop said after learning about the findings of the DCNF’s investigation.
Customs and Border Protection data shows that the overwhelming majority of the roughly 48,000 Chinese illegal immigrants encountered by U.S. authorities in 2024 have been single adults — and experts warn that “military-aged males” make up the lion’s share.
Bishop described the 1,100% spike in Chinese illegal immigrants since fiscal year 2022 as “historically unprecedented,” and told the DCNF that the inner workings of China’s human smuggling networks have largely remained a mystery to lawmakers up until now.
“Even people, like me, who’ve seen a lot of it have not yet totally come to grips with the sort of depth that you’ve described,” said Bishop, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee’s Oversight, Investigations and Accountability subcommittee.
The DCNF discovered the American Self-Guided Tour Channel and several related Telegram groups facilitating Chinese illegal immigration after analyzing a Chinese illegal immigrant’s abandoned cell phone, which was found near the California-Mexico border by a San Diego man in January 2024.
Telegram did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘Try Alternate Identities’
Through a months-long review of the American Self-Guided Tour Channel, the DCNF discovered that the group contains documents instructing Chinese nationals on how to navigate the U.S. immigration system, including scripts for claiming asylum and answering questions from Border Patrol agents.
One document translated by the DCNF advises those wishing to apply for a green card in the U.S. to “be sure to prepare a story about your persecution in advance.”
Another document provides responses to questions Border Patrol agents may ask in order to establish whether or not an asylum-seeker has a credible fear of persecution from their home country. Under current law, migrants who claim “credible fear” of persecution can seek asylum in the U.S.
“Even if moving would be inconvenient, can you live safely elsewhere in the country?” reads one of the hypothetical questions.
“No, because the situation I’m facing is nationwide,” the suggested answer states. “Even if I move to another place, I’ll be under threat just as before.”
Another post provides templates on how to craft asylum claims based on political, religious, racial, sexual and even gender persecution, despite women comprising only a small fraction of Chinese illegal immigrants.
“I am [name, ancestral hometown] nationality, I was born on [birthday]. Because I suffered gender-based violence and discrimination in my motherland, I am seeking asylum in [country],” the document’s template on gender persecution states. “My family forced me to marry, they wanted me to marry a man much older than me. When I refused, they beat me and threatened me saying that if I didn’t obey, they’d kill me. After marrying, my husband started physically and mentally abusing me, I was forced to leave my home and live in hiding. I tried seeking help from the local government, but they’re either corrupt or unwilling to help me. If I am forced to return to [motherland], I fear for my life, there I will face more violence and discrimination.”
Documents stored on the channel indicate a relatively sophisticated understanding of the U.S. immigration system, with some featuring intricate flow-charts to map out various potential U.S. immigration pathways.
One such flow-chart suggests that, as a last resort, those who’ve received a deportation order, but lack a passport to return to their countries, may consider starting the immigration process over with a false identity.
“You can try alternate identities, [but] the difficulty is relatively high and Trump may invite you to a meeting with state security agents in the future,” the document states, referring to former President Donald Trump.
‘Crossing Point’
The American Self-Guided Tour Channel also serves as a hub for travel guides facilitating Chinese illegal immigration, some of which identify specific border crossing points between the U.S. and Mexico, the DCNF discovered.
The guides vary in their geographic scope, with some focusing on travel between multiple countries, such as from China to Ecuador, which Rep. Bishop told the DCNF doesn’t require a travel visa for Chinese nationals.
“Essentially without visas, as I understand it, they can fly to Ecuador, and then they have an overland route and come up and come right through the border,” Bishop said.
The Telegram channel’s guides commonly list Quito, Ecuador, and Necocli, Colombia, as the first and last travel locations in South America for Chinese illegal immigrants.
Other guides on the channel provide more detailed advice on how to travel through a single country. One guide for Mexico falls into this category and features a series of Google Map screenshots that chart a path between Tapachula, Mexico and Laredo, Texas.
While most of the guides concern travel through South and Central America, several also focus on where and how to cross the U.S. southern border.
One such document identifies 15 border wall gaps along the southern border, including 12 in California as well as crossing points in Arizona and New Mexico.
This guide also provides Chinese nationals with basic instructions on what to carry and how to make the crossing.
“Take a taxi to a location near the wall crossing point, get out, and head straight in, carrying a few hundred dollars in cash for random contingencies,” the document advises.
The DCNF confirmed the existence of several of the crossing points while visiting the California border in June 2024.
Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon, California, told the DCNF that Chinese nationals now constitute a significant portion of crossings near San Diego.
“When I’ve been out at the border, most of my interactions have been with Chinese people,” Wells said. “I’ve come across groups of Chinese people standing on the side of the road in the middle of the night waiting to be picked up. I’ve come across migrant encampments, where there’s 100 or so Chinese people waiting to move on to the next stage, maybe 30 yards from the fence where they just crossed.”
Despite this, Wells told the DCNF that local officials remain in the dark about how the human smuggling networks operate.
“We have no idea,” Wells said. “You would think that something of such major importance to not only the nation, but to municipalities, you would have somebody from the government calling you and saying, ‘Hey, this is what we know. This is what’s going on. This is how it’s going to affect you or not affect you.’”
Wells told the DCNF that he believes Chinese illegal immigration poses a serious national security threat to the U.S. and pointed to multiple sensitive military and public utility sites close to the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego.
“There’s just so much to worry about from a committed enemy,” Wells said.
‘Cyber Police’
The DCNF’s review of the American Self-Guided Tour Channel also discovered that its owner — @wjackcn, or “Jack W” — claims to work as a cyber police officer stationed in China.
“Yes, I am cyber police,” Jack W stated on April 30, 2024, after an account in the channel asked him if he was a cyber police officer.
Cyber police serve China’s Ministry of Public Security by monitoring website content and spreading propaganda, according to federal authorities.
After identifying himself as a cyber police officer, Jack W outlined his policing duties in a post in which described himself as being “responsible for national security affairs, fighting reactionaries and foreign hostile forces.”
Later that day, Jack W directed channel members interested in national security work to apply to China’s premier civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security.
“If you want to work for the Ministry of State Security, please use the method of participating in the National Civil Servant exam,” Jack W told members of the Telegram channel.
Although the DCNF was unable to confirm Jack W’s affiliation with the Ministry of Public Security or Ministry of State Security, a review of the account’s posts found that it promoted Chinese illegal immigration and has banned members for expressing “hurtful opinions towards the motherland.”
In one instance, after a now-deleted account called for the CCP to be overthrown on April 22, 2024, Jack W banned 20 accounts.
The next month, Jack W announced he’d banned multiple accounts who’d criticized Chinese police officers.
“Those who disparaged an Urban Management and Law Enforcement video have already been banned,” Jack W announced on May 20, 2024, referring to a Chinese government agency that the U.S. nonprofit Human Rights Watch has described as a “thuggish para-police” tasked with enforcing non-criminal administrative regulations.
Jack W’s Telegram channel has also promoted CCP propaganda.
On June 4, 2024, the American Self-Guided Tour Channel posted an image of a tank with the caption: “Celebrating the 35th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Western-Backed Colour Revolution,” in reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, during which the Chinese government slaughtered as many as 10,000 pro-democracy protesters, according to the former British ambassador to China.
A DCNF review of the Telegram channel also discovered that, in addition to Jack W, several other members have identified themselves as Chinese police officers, military personnel and CCP members.
Rep. Bishop described Chinese illegal immigration as “the most astonishing threat.”
“Chinese nationals presenting at the southern border of the United States were almost unheard of previously,” Bishop told the DCNF.
In May 2024, Bishop chaired the House Homeland Security Committee’s Oversight, Investigations and Accountability subcommittee hearing concerning the approximately 8,000% increase in Chinese illegal immigration the U.S. has experienced since March 2021.
The hearing followed a January 2024 DCNF investigation revealing an internal Customs and Border Protection email showing that the Biden administration dramatically simplified the vetting process for Chinese illegal immigrants in April 2023 by reducing the number of interview questions Border Patrol agents are required to ask from roughly 40 down to just five.
“The experts that testified before the Subcommittee on Oversight that I chaired when we had a hearing on this established fairly persuasively that there is no vetting,” Bishop told the DCNF. “It’s a perfunctory, quick interview, and they move on into the country and are released.”
“China is the foremost adversary of the United States on the world stage,” Bishop warned. “Something’s descending on the United States that we should never have allowed to occur.”
Featured image courtesy of Denice Flores.
Britain’s most consequential espionage scandal in a generation has narrowed on Keir Starmer’s inner cabinet after The Sunday Times revealed that alleged Chinese agent Christopher Berry was intercepted at Heathrow Airport with a “suitcase full of cash” — and that senior officials, including National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell and Cabinet Secretary Christopher Wormald, held a closed-door meeting, allegedly discussing that advancing the case would harm relations with Beijing, weeks before prosecutors abandoned the insider-threat file.
The revelations, combined with an explosive Opposition letter from Kemi Badenoch and a rare diplomatic intervention from Washington, have plunged Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government into the most serious national-security controversy of its tenure — one now shaking both Westminster and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Not since the Kim Philby affair and the exposure of the Cambridge Spy Ring has a British government been so roiled by allegations of insider compromise and appeasement toward a hostile foreign state.
As The Sunday Times reported, Christopher Berry — a 33-year-old academic from Oxfordshire — was stopped under the Terrorism and Border Security Act after a February 2023 flight from China. Police seized £4,000 in cash, believed to have been supplied by his Chinese handler, codenamed “Alex,” linked to the Ministry of State Security.
A witness statement tabled in Parliament last week indicated that Berry funnelled real-time political intelligence through his MSS handler to one of Beijing’s senior leaders, all collected from a former Chinese teaching colleague — a Parliamentary researcher with deep access to senior Conservative MPs. Beijing reportedly viewed those MPs as a strategic threat, fearing that if they rose to higher office they would adopt a far stricter stance toward China’s geopolitical ambitions.
Though Berry was not detained at the time, the incident became central to the espionage case later dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service when the Starmer government declined to certify that China posed an “ongoing threat to national security” — a legal requirement under the Official Secrets Act.
The Sunday Times also revealed that Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Collins, the government’s sole witness, privately acknowledged that the decision not to describe China as an “ongoing threat” was “political.” The paper further disclosed that Jonathan Powell — a former banking executive who rose to become Starmer’s National Security Adviser — chaired a meeting on September 1 attended by Cabinet Secretary Christopher Wormald and MI5 Director-General Sir Ken McCallum, in which “the general theme of discussion was how the UK’s relationship with China was going to be damaged by this case.”
If accurate, that account directly contradicts Starmer’s assurance to Parliament that “no minister or special adviser was involved.” The implication — that Britain’s most senior national-security officials were weighing diplomatic consequences while an active espionage prosecution was still underway — has intensified accusations that the case was derailed by political interference rather than evidentiary weakness.
Within hours of the Sunday Times story, Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch posted a letter to X accusing Keir Starmer of misleading Parliament and concealing ministerial involvement in the case’s collapse.
Framing the letter, Badenoch sought to explain the rapidly evolving affair to a wider audience. “I don’t blame you if you’ve struggled to follow the China spying case engulfing Parliament. Even MPs are finding it hard to keep up with a story that seems to change by the hour,” she wrote. “I suspect many fair-minded people have assumed this story can’t contain much. It seems too implausible for the government to have deliberately let off people who were accused of spying on MPs. But the story is truly astonishing. The layers of it have unravelled over the past few weeks like something from a spy novel.”
In the letter itself, Badenoch demands full disclosure of all correspondence, meetings, and witness-statement revisions involving Jonathan Powell, the Attorney General, or the Cabinet Office. She references the Sunday Times account directly, noting that “Powell left attendees with the understanding that Deputy National Security Adviser Collins’s witness statement would operate within the language of the report,” implying foreknowledge and coordination between Downing Street and prosecutors. She further alleges that Starmer’s ministers “softened” later witness statements to downplay Chinese espionage, replacing hard intelligence assessments with diplomatic phrasing designed to reassure Beijing. Her conclusion is cutting: “You have shown Britain is weak in the face of espionage, and have emboldened our enemies to believe they can spy on us with impunity.”
As reported previously by The Bureau, the controversy has now drawn international concern. The Chair of the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, John Moolenaar, has issued an extraordinary public rebuke on the court matter — a move almost without precedent between close allies. In a two-page letter dated October 16, 2025, addressed to James Roscoe, chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy in Washington, Moolenaar warned that Britain’s decision to abandon the prosecution risked setting “a dangerous precedent that foreign adversaries can target democratically elected legislators with impunity.” He wrote that the decision “deeply troubles” U.S. lawmakers and “undermines Five Eyes security coordination,” given the substantial amount of evidence against Berry and Christopher Cash, who were accused of funnelling parliamentary intelligence to the Chinese Communist Party.
“I hope the UK government will not allow this case to falter,” Moolenaar said, “and will instead take the steps necessary to ensure that both justice and due process are served.”
The letter, co-signed by senior members of the Committee and publicly released by Congress, marks an exceptional public intervention in a live national-security case involving a Five Eyes partner. Moolenaar added that the decision to drop the prosecution — despite evidence confirming a direct intelligence channel from Westminster to Beijing — “paints a concerning picture,” noting the resumption of high-level UK–China trade talks, negotiations over China’s proposed “super embassy” in London, and London’s ongoing review of its diplomatic posture toward Beijing. “Allowing this PRC aggression to go unchecked,” he warned, “would only incentivize the CCP to further interfere in Western democracies.”
As The Bureau previously detailed, Matthew Collins’s witness statement traced an intelligence pipeline connecting Westminster directly to Beijing’s leadership. Berry, via his handler “Alex,” transmitted reports obtained from Christopher Cash, a parliamentary aide with access to Conservative MPs critical of Beijing. Collins confirmed that some of the same intelligence later appeared in the possession of a senior CCP Politburo Standing Committee member — reportedly Cai Qi, one of Xi Jinping’s closest allies. Collins also documented Beijing’s targeted inquiries into the 2022 Conservative leadership race, focusing on Tom Tugendhat and Neil O’Brien, both members of the China Research Group (CRG) and long-standing critics of the CCP.
Taken together, the Heathrow cash seizure, the Powell-chaired meeting, the Badenoch letter, and the U.S. congressional intervention point to a modern Cold War crisis — a confrontation that has now moved beyond Westminster to test the cohesion of the Western alliance itself.
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A tiny province just did what the federal government refuses to: demand answers about foreign interference and Chinese money.
Prince Edward Island’s new government just lit a signal fire Ottawa can’t ignore—two formal letters demanding immediate, transparent federal investigations into alleged foreign interference and money laundering on the Island. One to RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme, the other to FINTRAC CEO Sarah Paquet. Clear, direct, no hedging: talk to the whistleblowers, follow the money, and determine whether criminal or regulatory action is warranted.
And here’s the part that should make every sane person furious: why did it take a new government to do the obvious? Where was this urgency from the last crew running Charlottetown? For years, Islanders were told to calm down, look away, don’t ask questions—and now, in week one of grown-up supervision, we suddenly discover the tools were always there. Why didn’t the previous government pull them?
Even worse, why hasn’t the Liberal establishment in Ottawa barley lifted a finger in regards to foreign interference in this country? This is the same crowd that held a public inquiry into foreign interference, took victory laps, and then… parked the file. The commission issued volumes of findings and 50-plus recommendations, but action? Mostly press releases. Meanwhile, the much-hyped foreign influence registry —passed on paper in 2024— still isn’t fully in force, with cabinet dithering while everyone pretends it’s complicated. If the smallest province can move in days, what’s Ottawa’s excuse after years of warnings and a law they already passed?
Premier Rob Lantz framed it plainly: Islanders deserve clarity and competent, depoliticized scrutiny. The province says the move follows years of speculation and a Parliament Hill press conference on Oct. 8 where a former RCMP superintendent suggested evidence could justify a criminal probe centered on PEI. Translation: this is no longer a fringe concern—it’s now an official paper trail with the RCMP and FINTRAC on the hook.
PEI also reminded Ottawa that in February 2025 it ordered the Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (IRAC) to run an independent land-ownership investigation—with new powers added to the Lands Protection Act in 2022—amid public questions about complex land purchases and potential indirect control. That review is ongoing and now sits alongside the requested federal probes.
Context matters: investigative reporting in recent weeks connected these concerns to Buddhist-affiliated networks and called for a wider federal inquiry. Whether every allegation holds or not, PEI’s letters escalate the file from media claims to formal federal scrutiny—exactly where it belongs if Canada is serious about foreign interference.
Bottom line: a tiny province—Prince Edward Island of all places—just forced a national reckoning. Not Toronto, not Ottawa, not some vaunted federal intelligence agency. No, it took 160,000 salt-of-the-earth Islanders to do what the entire Liberal Party has refused to do for years: demand an investigation into what looks suspiciously like CCP-linked land grabs, money laundering, and political influence operations happening right under our noses.
And yet—silence from Ottawa. Why? Because could it be that the same people now running the show in this country are the ones who spent the last decade cheerleading for the Chinese Communist Party? Mark Carney, has a track record with China that reads like a LinkedIn endorsement from the People’s Liberation Army. Brookfield, where Carney was Vice Chair, took $250 million from the Bank of China to fund its real estate empire. You think that doesn’t come with strings? Please.
And Trudeau? Let’s not forget, this is the man who once said he admired China’s “basic dictatorship”—because, of course he did. That kind of centralized control makes things so efficient when you’re trying to crush dissent and funnel wealth into the hands of a compliant elite.
The ball is in the RCMP and FINTRAC’s court. But if you’re expecting urgency from institutions shackled to the same political class that let this rot take hold, don’t hold your breath. PEI just did the hard part. Now we get to find out if Canada has any real institutions left.
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