Five weeks before the birth of her third child, Grace Drexel sat in Washington speaking about her father, the grandfather her children barely know, and the hope that President Donald Trump might help bring him home.
Her father, Pastor Ezra Jin, has spent the past seven months detained in China alongside dozens of other Christian leaders in what advocates describe as one of the largest crackdowns on an underground Protestant church in recent years.
Now, as Trump visits Beijing for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Drexel says her family is clinging to a rare moment of hope after Trump publicly pledged to raise Pastor Jin’s imprisonment directly with Xi.
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“I’ll bring it up,” Trump told a reporter when asked whether he planned to discuss the detained pastor during the trip.
“It’s such a tremendous honor,” Drexel told Fox News Digital. “To have one of the most powerful men in the world know my father by name and mention his case to General Secretary Xi Jinping.”
White House spokesperson Olivia Wales told Fox News Digital, “There is no greater champion for religious freedom around the world than President Trump.”
For Drexel, this could end years of suffering. Her family has been separated for almost a decade — her mother and younger brothers fled China in 2018 after authorities shut down Zion Church’s physical sanctuary in Beijing, fearing they could become collateral targets in the growing crackdown on Christians.
Pastor Jin chose to stay behind with his community.
“My father actually had many opportunities to apply for a green card,” Drexel said. “He felt the calling for China.”
Drexel herself has not seen her father in person since 2020.
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Now pregnant with her third child, she says all she wants is for her father to finally reunite with his family.
“We would really, really love for our children to also experience and learn from their Grandpa,” she said.
Drexel described her father not as a political dissident, but as a pastor whose only mission was to remain faithful to Christianity outside Communist Party control.
“My father is a pastor in China and like Christians everywhere, he believed that the church should only have one God and serve one God,” she told Fox News Digital.
She described Zion Church as independent from government oversight and deeply rooted in Scripture and community service.
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“We helped with the society and the community around us, love our neighbors, and to love God,” she said.
But beyond the role of pastor, Drexel says she simply knew her father as a gentle man devoted to those around him.
“Ultimately, I know my father as just a very gentle and kind man,” she said. “He is not very confrontational generally. He just loved everyone around him.”
“He never even criticized anyone, including his children, much as we were growing up,” she added.
Drexel tearfully said that relatives learned that her father had been handcuffed, his head shaved, and that he was struggling to receive medication while in detention.
“And this kind and gentle man is now in prison,” she said. “All because he was just leading a church.”
The crackdown against Zion Church began years before Pastor Jin’s arrest.
According to Drexel, the pressure intensified around 2016 and 2017 after Xi Jinping rewrote China’s religious regulations and formally advanced the policy known as the “Sinicization” of religion, an effort critics say forces religious groups to align with Communist Party ideology.
Around that time, Zion Church became one of many churches targeted by the authorities.
Initially, Drexel says government officials demanded the church install facial-recognition cameras inside the sanctuary to monitor worshipers.
“We told them all our services are public. You can come and view anytime,” she said. “But we didn’t feel that we wanted to put an extra amount of surveillance or control on our congregation.”
After the church refused, Drexel says authorities installed surveillance cameras in the building’s lobby instead and began systematically targeting church members.
“Each and every member who came on Sunday [was] being harassed,” she said. Some worshipers lost jobs, others were forced out of apartments, while some families were threatened through their children’s education and even their parents’ retirement benefits.
“It was all possible under the Chinese Communist Party if they wanted you to stop doing something,” she said.
Authorities eventually confiscated the church’s property and shut down its physical worship space. Pastor Jin then moved services online and into smaller home gatherings, which led authorities to later accuse church leaders of the “illegal use of information networks” because of those online and decentralized worship activities.
But she says her father’s case is only one piece of a much larger crackdown unfolding across China.
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“There are so many pastors and church leaders and churches being persecuted in China actively today,” she added. “We know that there are hundreds of pastors that are currently in prison or are in detention.”
“This is a very critical period in China,” Drexel said. “And it’s very disheartening and very scary for many Christians in China.”
The broader persecution campaign against Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners is also documented in “China’s War on Faith,” the recently released book by former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.
Brownback profiles believers imprisoned, tortured, and surveilled for practicing religion outside state-approved institutions and argues that the Chinese Communist Party increasingly sees independent faith itself as a threat to Party authority.
For Drexel, Trump’s decision to publicly mention her father’s name represents more than diplomacy.
“We hope that as the two leaders are meeting together that they will both have a softening of the hearts and will release my father and allow him to come to the U.S.,” she said.
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said the Chinese government protects “freedom of religious belief in accordance with the law” and argued that people of all ethnic groups in China enjoy religious freedom. Liu pointed to official figures showing nearly 200 million religious believers in China, along with more than 380,000 clerical personnel, approximately 5,500 religious groups and more than 140,000 registered places of worship.
Liu said Beijing regulates religious affairs involving “national interests and the public interest” while opposing what it describes as illegal or criminal activities carried out under the guise of religion. He also accused foreign countries and media outlets of interfering in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of religious freedom and urged journalists to “respect the facts” and stop what he described as “attacking and smearing” China’s religious policies and religious freedom record.
