Secretary of State Marco Rubio has committed to helping to promote the passage of legislation against the Chinese administration’s state-sanctioned forced organ collection.
The issue arose in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Rubio testified on May 21st about the State Department’s 2026 budget proposal.
Rep. Chris Smith (RN.J.), who co-led the Stop Forced Organ Collection Act (HR 1503), sued Rubio for help.
“You and I have been working on issues like the harvest of forced organs,” Smith told Rubio, saying they co-chaired the bipartisan parliamentary executive committee on China to address China’s human rights issues.
“(Chinese leader) Xi Jinping earns billions by killing tens of thousands of people, an average of 28 years old each year,” Smith said. “And you know that, you are the sponsor of the bill.
“If we can take it out of the Senate, we hope that it will close out this terrible human rights abuse in China.
“And that’s a global bill. It would ban forced organ collections from deep-seated prisons over 20 years with actual penalties for people who are part of the supply chain.”
In his final assembly, the Florida Senator signed the Senate version of the Smith Act. It aims to sanction perpetrators of abuse with civil fines of up to $250,000 and up to $1 million and 20 years of prison criminal fines. The bill passed the House on May 7th with a nearly pointless vote, garnering the support of 406 lawmakers.
Rubio responded, calling forced organ collection “concern.”
“We obviously will help in some way that we can help us pass it in the Senate.
The suspended organ collection law would sanction those involved in abuse, including members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by freezing assets, banning transactions, revoking visas and eliminating other immigration benefits.
Rubio was openly speaking about his issues as a senator. Last July he led the Falun Gong Protection Act, which aimed to deploy sanctions tools to protect the major victim groups of forced organ collection, practitioners of persecuted faith groups legal groups. The bill also passed the House in May when it was reintroduced at the 119th Congress.
In May 2024, Rubio and Smith wrote to then-state secretary Antony Blinken, asking them to set up a compensation programme that directly demands evidence of the Chinese administration’s illegal organ trade.
Smith’s bill would require the United States to conduct forced organ collection and assessments of human trafficking in various foreign countries.
“We’ll leave the State Department to look into what’s going on in all countries,” and “we’ll determine if there’s a forced organ collection issue,” Smith told the Epoch Times on the day the House bill was passed.
“But no one would make it worse than the People’s Republic of China,” he said.
Smith pointed out that forced organ collections have been “too long” and that if they weren’t accountable it would “continue to get worse.”
The act of murder for organs was “quickly from Nazi Germany and Joseph Mengele… the cruelty of what he did during the Third Reich,” he said.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Gong, is a spiritual practice that encourages practitioners to adhere to the core principles of truth, compassion and tolerance. It was first introduced to the public in 1992, and its popularity grew rapidly, with official estimates showing that by 1999 at least 70 million people had acquired practices in China.
The CCP responded by launching a brutal persecution campaign that continued to this day, viewed as a challenge to its authoritarian rules.
In 2019, the Chinese court in London concluded that the Chinese government had been forcing organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience over the years, and that Falun Gong practitioners were the “major source” of organs.
In 2023, Texas became the first US state to enact laws to combat issues. The Act prohibits health insurance providers from covering organ transplants, including organ transplants that contain organs sourced from China or countries related to forced organ collection.
Four other US states (Utah, Idaho, Tennessee and Arizona) have similar laws.
