Transnational repression is what happens when a state reaches beyond its own borders to silence the people it cannot control at home — exiles, refugees, journalists, and diaspora communities. Its tools range from assassination and abduction to unlawful deportation, digital surveillance, and threats against the family members left behind.
As Freedom House has documented, it is one of the defining human-rights threats of the era — and it does not stop at the borders of any democracy, including the United States.
The targets are rarely random. They are journalists and human-rights defenders whose reporting embarrasses a regime; political opposition figures who organize from abroad; ethnic and religious minorities treated as suspect wherever they live; and former insiders who know too much.
The damage radiates outward. When one exile is attacked, an entire diaspora learns to self-censor — to stop attending protests, stop calling home, stop speaking to reporters. That chilling effect, multiplied across millions of people, is the point.
“The message is that no one is ever truly out of reach.”
Four ways states reach across borders
Freedom House groups the tactics of transnational repression into four broad categories.
Direct attacks
Assassinations, physical assaults, abductions, and renditions — violence carried out on foreign soil.
Long-distance threats
Spyware and digital surveillance, online harassment, and threats — or reprisals — against relatives back home.
Mobility controls
Cancelled passports, abuse of Interpol Red Notices, and interference with visas and asylum claims to trap targets or force their return.
Coercion by proxy
Pressuring host states into unlawful detentions and deportations — turning another country's police and courts into instruments of repression.
The United States is one of the most common host countries for transnational repression: a place dissidents flee to, only to find that the governments they escaped still reach for them — with spyware, with intimidation of their families, and with attempts to bend U.S. institutions to their ends.
But exile cuts both ways. Among the prisoners the NPPC documents are Americans who were themselves forced abroad — who fled prosecution they considered political and built new lives in other countries, sometimes pursued for decades by extradition demands and bounties. The line between a refuge and a state that reaches across borders is not always where we expect it.
Political exiles we document
These are the people in the NPPC database currently living in exile — forced to leave the country to escape imprisonment or persecution. Each profile links to their full case.
Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was stopped in his car while driving his partner to work on March 25, 2025. ICE agents forcefully detained him without a warrant...
Arnold Lockshin is a biochemist and cancer researcher whose political identity became central to an international controversy during the late Cold War...
Barrett Brown is a journalist who in 2010 founded Project PM, an open source website that analyzed government and corporates data dumps of information...
Barry Cooper is a former police officer who served as one of the nations top narcotics officers before becoming disillusioned with the war on drugs. C...
Catherine Kerkow was a Black Panther affiliate who in 1972, hijacked Western Airlines Flight 701 with accomplice Willie Roger Holder, demanding freedo...
Charlie Hill was a member of the Republic of New Afrika, the Black-nationalist movement that sought an independent Black republic in the Deep South. O...
Dave Smith was a United States Army deserter who opposed the Vietnam War and reached Sweden, one of roughly a thousand American exiles — some eight hu...
David Hemler was a United States Air Force airman who deserted on February 10, 1984, aged 21, from the 6913th Electronic Security Squadron at Augsburg...
Edward Snowden is a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who in June 2013, revealed classified information about global surveillance progr...
Frank Blackhorse — born Frank Leonard DeLuca and also known as Frank Black Horse — was an American Indian Movement (AIM) figure prosecuted over the 19...
Gavin Seim was Libertarian activist and Congressional candidate who organized rallies protesting gun control measures and created viral videos around...
George Wright was a Black Liberation Army member who on July 31, 1972 hijacked Delta Air Lines Flight 841 with a group of four others after it departe...
Ismail Ali is a Virgin Island independence activist and political asylee in Cuba known for being a part of the "Fountain Valley 5." The "Five" are a g...
Jacob Appelbaum (also known as “ioerror”) is an American computer security researcher, hacker, privacy activist, and journalist who gained public atte...
Jeremy Hinzman is an Iraq War resister who was the first American deserter to seek refugee status in Canada. He enlisted in the U.S. Army as a paratro...
John Anthony Robles II is an indigenous Taino, anti-racist activist and journalist from Puerto Rico. In 1995 Robles work to expose public fraud in Yol...
John Dougan was a former police officer and candidate for Sheriff of Palm Beach County Florida, who ran against Sheriff Ric Bradshaw. Dougan set up a...
Josephine Sunshine Overaker was a member of the Earth Liberation Front / Animal Liberation Front cell prosecuted in Operation Backfire, indicted for h...
Joshua Key, born in Guthrie, Oklahoma in 1978, enlisted in the United States Army in 2002 and was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. He served eight...
Kyle Snyder, born September 12, 1983 and raised partly in foster care in Colorado, enlisted in the United States Army in 2004 and served in Iraq with...
Leo Frederick Burt was a University of Wisconsin student and rowing crew member alleged to be the fourth conspirator in the August 24, 1970 Sterling H...
Mario Guevara is a Salvadoran-American journalist based in Atlanta, Georgia, and the founder of MG News (formerly a reporter for the Spanish-language...
Melvin McNair was a Vietnam veteran who became involved in Black-liberation and antiwar politics after experiencing racism during his military service...
Momodou Taal is a graduate student with dual United Kingdom and Gambian citizenship who was enrolled at Cornell University. In March 2025, as U.S. imm...
Pete O'Neal was chairman of the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party, where he built free-breakfast and other community programs. Arrested i...
Ranjani Srinivasan is an Indian national and doctoral researcher who was enrolled at Columbia University. In 2025, her F-1 student visa was revoked by...
Richard Johnstone, a farm boy from Brooklyn, Iowa, deserted from the United States Army during the Vietnam War and reached Sweden, among the roughly o...
Puerto Rican independentista and member of Los Macheteros (Ejército Popular Boricua) who, while working as a security guard at the Wells Fargo armored...
FALN member severely injured in a 1978 premature bomb explosion at a Queens, NY safehouse that took both of his hands and most of his face. Convicted...
William Schiller, known as Bill, was a draft resister from suburban Chicago and an early recruit to the Peace Corps who left the United States rather...
Freedom House's research points to a shared agenda for blunting transnational repression. The responsibility is distributed.
Identify and warn likely targets, refuse to carry out proxy detentions or deportations, train police to recognize the threat, and reform the review of Interpol Red Notices so they cannot be weaponized.
Document incidents, support survivors and their families, and keep the cases visible so that distance never becomes silence.
Shut down the commercial spyware market, harden products against state surveillance, and notify users who are targeted.
Sanction perpetrators, build accountability mechanisms, and treat cross-border repression as the human-rights violation it is.
- Freedom House — Transnational Repression The most comprehensive ongoing catalogue of cross-border repression, including the TNR Watch incident tracker. The figures on this page are drawn from this project.
- NPPC — Political Prisoner Database & Map Our own documentation of political prisoners and exiles, including the cases listed above.
This briefing summarizes Freedom House's published research for an NPPC audience and connects it to the exile cases in our database. It is not produced or endorsed by Freedom House.