(NewsNation) — For several years, the White House has told Katherine Swidan that bringing her wrongfully imprisoned son home from China was a top priority. But it has been 11 years since his arrest, and now, she is turning to her only other option: asking Chinese President Xi Jinping to release her son.
President Joe Biden had an opportunity to discuss the matter earlier this week during a meeting with Xi in San Francisco. However, Katherine Swidan said it was unlikely that the hot-button topic was even brought up between the two.
“It’s speculated on several different venues, but I don’t have any real concrete evidence that he did,” she said.
Mark Swidan, a Texan on death row in China, was arrested in 2012 on drug-related charges despite no evidence he committed any crime. In April, a Chinese court denied his appeal and upheld his death sentence.
In 2012, Mark Swidan traveled from Texas to China to buy materials to remodel his home. He was arrested on accusations of trafficking and manufacturing methamphetamine, but U.S. leaders have argued Swidan was not in China at the time of the alleged crime. The United Nations says Swidan was arbitrarily detained.
Katherine Swidan has been pushing for the release of her son for years and said ahead of the Biden-Xi meeting that Biden is “doing nothing” to help wrongfully detained people in China.
“I haven’t heard from him,” Katherine Swidan said. “The Chinese decided that he could not have any visitors since August. That was the last time he was visited by the consulate.”
She was told that her son was moved to a different prison, and it would be another six weeks until she would get to hear from him or his whereabouts. It’s been three months in total since she’s had any communication at all.
On Wednesday, she told NewsNation that the last time she actually spoke to her son was in 2018 for about five minutes. Letters she’s received from him have revealed some details about the conditions of the prison he is in.
“They had broken his hands five to seven times, they had interrogated him for many many days, beating him, I don’t know what else … but they were they were torturing him trying to get a video saying he renounced the United States,” Swidan said. “He’s been tortured ever since then, humiliated, he’s been very sick, he’s lost over a hundred pounds.”
Jason Poblete, a lawyer for Mark Swidan, told NewsNation in April his client was being treated like a political prisoner.
Katherine Swidan previously told NewsNation that she feels like she’s “in the dark” on what is being done to secure her son’s release. She also said Biden has never spoken to her directly about the case.
Now, she’s sending Xi a message:
“To let Mark go after all this time would be gracious of you, and it would also let the world know that hostage is not just a word, that this man doesn’t deserve to be there,” she said. “Mark needs to come home. My baby, my best friend.”
Katherine Swidan said she feels she will have better luck asking Xi for help in releasing her son than continuously bugging the Biden administration.
NewsNation’s Tyler Wornell contributed to this report.