The first Trump administration unsuccessfully attempted to ban WeChat from US app stores in 2020, but new legislation makes the move possible
CCP-controlled messaging platform WeChat has become a favorite tool of Chinese criminal rings inside the United States to “facilitate drug trafficking, human trafficking, [and] money laundering,” according to Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), who in a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon requested that the White House ban the app from cellphones in the United States.
WeChat, owned by China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd., has emerged in recent years as a primary means of “coordination among Chinese criminal networks” operating stateside, wrote Lankford, who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as well as the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The app has grown in popularity as Chinese nationals enter the United States, buy inexpensive farmland in places like Lankford’s home state of Oklahoma, and use that land to grow illicit marijuana for sale on the black market.
U.S. law enforcement agencies, Lankford noted in the Jan. 16 letter, do “not have access to WeChat’s server or any of the encrypted communications and transactions that occur on this app,” making it “an investigative black box” that is “uniquely appealing to Chinese criminals operating on American soil.”
Lankford’s request comes nearly six years after President Donald Trump’s first-term attempt to ban WeChat from U.S. app stores with an executive order, citing China’s control over its user data as a pressing national security risk. A California magistrate judge ruled the action unconstitutional, and the Biden administration subsequently nixed the executive order, instead instructing the federal government to conduct a national security assessment of both WeChat and the similarly CCP-controlled TikTok.
In the intervening six years, though, Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a 2024 law requiring TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the social media platform. The law also included provisions allowing the president to blacklist Chinese applications like WeChat, meaning that a fresh ban on its presence on U.S. app stores would likely be upheld in court, particularly in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s mid-January decision backing the law.
Trump now has “explicit authority to identify and act against companies whose ownership or control by foreign adversaries poses an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security,” Lankford wrote. The next step would be for the White House to formally determine “that WeChat qualifies as a covered company under the statute,” effectively banning its use and availability on U.S. cellphones, according to the senator.
The Pentagon blacklisted Tencent early last year over its role as one of several “Chinese military companies” operating in the United States, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has accused Tencent of conducting “espionage and censorship” on behalf of the CCP. Its founder, Ma Huateng, is a member of the CCP and the Yale Center Beijing advisory board, which the university uses to “form new partnerships with organizations in China,” the Free Beacon reported at the time.
Republicans broadly considered WeChat a national security threat during Trump’s first term, primarily because the Chinese government has access to its user data, but legislation to curb the problem did not yet exist. Without a policy fix, WeChat evolved into the top platform for Chinese criminals in the United States. In 2022, for instance, a Chinese national was charged with murdering four people on an illegal marijuana farm in Kingfisher, Okla., in a crime believed to be linked to Chinese crime networks. State law enforcement agencies assessed that “many of these groups have direct financial backing from China,” with WeChat being a central cog in the operation, according to Lankford.
Given the past and present threats posed by WeChat, Trump must use his newfound legal “authority to designate WeChat as a covered company” under the law, Lankford wrote, adding that such action “would advance U.S. national security interests, protect American citizens from foreign criminals operating inside our borders, and help our law enforcement fight against Chinese criminal networks operating in my state and across the country.”
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