At 2:30 A.M. on January 22, 2025, Wenjian Zhuo left his home in Queens, climbed into his Toyota Sienna, and began heading north to pick up a passenger almost four hundred miles away. Zhuo, who was thirty-one, had emigrated from China several years earlier and tried a few different jobs—at one point, he was a sales assistant in a pharmacy—before becoming a driver in the spring of 2024. At first he drove for Uber, but then he saw other Chinese drivers building their own businesses by advertising on RedNote, the Chinese social-media app. Zhuo followed their lead, setting up his own RedNote page.
Chinese tourist agencies also began sending him customers, and soon he was busy every day. He picked up international students at the Taft School, in Connecticut, took tourists to Niagara Falls, and chauffeured an executive’s family through Boston and Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2024, when the Chinese rapper Vinida Weng arrived in New York to perform in Central Park, he picked her up at the airport. “I’ve met people from all over the world, and listened to all kinds of stories,” he posted in Mandarin on RedNote. “It’s also made me look at my own city with fresh eyes.”
His latest job had come in the night before, in the usual way—a potential customer had sent him a message in Mandarin on WeChat.
“I’d like to book a vehicle. It’s long-distance,” the customer wrote.
“How many people and how many pieces of luggage?” Zhuo replied.
“One person, about six to seven boxes,” the customer wrote.
They agreed on a price for the trip—nine hundred and forty dollars, including gas and tolls—and the customer sent him a deposit of a hundred dollars and the pickup and drop-off locations. Zhuo didn’t look closely at the addresses, in northern New York State and midtown Manhattan. He thought that the passenger was likely an international student.
The next morning, Zhuo, following directions on his phone, travelled north on I-87. Snow covered the trees along the highway, and the farther he drove, the lower the temperature dipped. After about three hundred miles, he found himself in New York’s North Country, near the Canadian border. Zhuo speaks little English, and he could not read many of the signs he passed, but after heading west on New York State Route 37 for a while, he noticed there was something odd about the stretch of the highway he was on: almost every establishment advertised itself with a leaf. Although Zhuo didn’t realize it, he was on a Mohawk reservation, part of a territory called Akwesasne that straddles Canada and the United States. After New York legalized marijuana, in 2021, the reservation became a popular place to open a cannabis shop, in part because the tribe’s licensing rules were easier to navigate than the state’s.
About seven hours after leaving home, Zhuo arrived at the address he had been given—18 State Route 37. He was surprised to find that he was at a gas station. Zhuo tried to rest in his car, and then, at exactly 11 A.M., the pickup time, he wrote to his customer in Mandarin: “Are you outside?”
“Yes, right away,” his contact replied. But no one showed up, and when Zhuo texted again, the contact responded, “Bro, my friend overslept. He is packing.” After another forty minutes, Zhuo’s contact wrote to him, “Let me know how much you charge for the waiting fee.”
“Tell him to get ready faster because I need to drive seven hours back,” Zhuo replied.
Eventually, around 2 P.M., a man wearing sunglasses and a Buffalo Bills ski hat showed up in a white pickup truck. Zhuo had expected his passenger would be Chinese, but this man was not; Zhuo had no way of communicating with him beyond a few words. The man directed Zhuo to follow him and drove a short distance to a house, where he loaded twelve items from a garage into Zhuo’s minivan: cardboard boxes, a suitcase, two bags, and a plastic bin with an orange top.
As the items filled the back of the van, Zhuo started clearing off the front passenger seat. “You sit here,” he told the man.
“No,” the man replied. “I am not going.”
“O.K., O.K.” Zhuo said, then called the man who’d hired him. “He’s not going to New York?” he asked in Mandarin. “Only these things are going to New York?”
The customer confirmed that this was accurate. As Zhuo started driving, the two kept talking, with a camera in the rearview mirror recording the conversation. “You’ve got all the stuff—don’t go messing with it!” the customer said.
“What do you mean by messing with it?” Zhuo replied. “I am heading back now. Don’t worry.”
Thirty seconds after Zhuo hung up with the customer, he called a friend, a fellow-driver in New York City. “Let me ask you something,” Zhuo said as he drove. “I got a situation.” He explained where he was and what had happened, then asked his friend if he thought the boxes contained “anything not clean.”
“Very hard to say,” his friend said.
“So what should I do now?”
“How am I supposed to know? Why don’t you open it and inspect it?”
Zhuo said that he would not “dare open up other people’s stuff,” and the two discussed the situation. “Could it be marijuana in the car?” Zhuo asked. “What does marijuana even smell like?”
“Marijuana smells like marijuana,” his friend said.
“I did smell something kind of fragrant,” Zhuo said.
He had never smoked marijuana, he would later say, and he had not been exposed to it while growing up in China, where it is illegal. “Shit, I’m just feeling unsure about this right now,” he told his friend. “When I came over earlier, while waiting, I felt that something was off.” But he had just driven nearly seven hours. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. Then “this non-Chinese guy walked over” and “handed the box of stuff to me.”
“Damn, there might be something in there,” his friend said.
“If there’s this much product, wouldn’t it be worth tens of millions? If I fucking sell it, could I then go back to China and retire?” Zhuo said with a nervous grin. He put on a blinker and turned back onto State Route 37.
“Once you sell it, you could end up rotting in prison,” his friend said.
“So,” Zhuo asked, “what should I do?”
“How should I know? I don’t know. I never had this kind of experience.”
The longer the two friends spoke, the more uneasy Zhuo seemed to become. As he drove, he was surrounded by images of leaves once again, on billboards and in storefronts. Behind him, the luggage and boxes were stacked so high that they were visible to passing cars. “I’m going to find a place in a bit, dammit, pull over and see what it is,” Zhuo told his friend.
He also toyed with the idea that he could stop thinking about what might be in the boxes. “I feel like if I am not aware, if I don’t open it,” he said, “it is O.K. If I am unaware, it’s fine. If there really is something . . .”
“You have to go hire a lawyer,” his friend said.
Some thirty minutes after Zhuo began driving, he glanced in his side-view mirror and saw a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle—a white Chevy Tahoe—behind him. “How could this be?” he muttered to himself. He heard its siren and pulled to the side of the road.
He would later learn that Border Patrol agents had been surveilling him for hours, starting even before he had arrived at the gas station. That morning, James Russell, an agent in an unmarked car not far from the border, had “witnessed a van driven by what appeared to be a male of Asian descent,” as he later put it. Russell ran the license plate and learned that the vehicle was from New York City. “That piqued my interest,” he said. “You have a single male driving a minivan. We’ve recently had numerous minivans used in smuggling events for humans.” Later, two other agents, who had been notified to be on the lookout for Zhuo’s Toyota Sienna, spotted him after he picked up the boxes and luggage.
After pulling over, Zhuo opened his window, and one of the agents, Clinton Joseph, approached. Joseph would later say that a strong scent of marijuana was emanating from the minivan.
“Hello, sir,” Zhuo said.
“Are you by yourself?” Joseph asked.
“So sorry, my English no good,” Zhuo said.
“Do you have I.D. on you?” Joseph asked. “What’s in the back here?”
Zhuo pulled out his driver’s license, then reached for his phone, opened Google Translate, and spoke in Mandarin. The phone translated: “A customer asked me to come over and pick up something and take it to New York.”
Joseph asked him to hand over his keys; Zhuo complied. The agents brought him to a Border Patrol station, where two other agents interrogated him, asking questions through a translator after he waived his right to an attorney. “The amount of narcotics that you had in your vehicle tonight is unacceptable,” one of the agents, David Gottschall, told him. “And the smell of marijuana is obvious.” He added, “You’re under arrest, and you’re going to be charged with a significant crime.” Gottschall seemed to suspect that Zhuo was part of a major trafficking operation. “What you had in your car is incredibly valuable to people, and there’s a lot of other people who are involved, but they’re not here,” he said. “The only person who can tell me about them is you.”
“I want to tell you everything I know,” Zhuo said. He offered access to the cellphone he had used to communicate with his customer and to video cameras on the inside and outside of his vehicle, explaining that the footage would show the man who had given him the boxes. “You can see that I told you the truth,” he said.
Zhuo also volunteered to go undercover: “I’m thinking, if you wanted to catch the person who ordered this, maybe I can try to go to the delivery place and I will ask him to come back.”
“Well, that sounds a little too dangerous, and we don’t want to put you in harm’s way,” the other agent said.
Zhuo was taken to Clinton County Jail, in Plattsburgh. There, he called his partner, Minxing, whom he lived with in Queens; she was eight months pregnant with their first child. Minxing recalled, “He was so positive, ‘Oh, I’m coming home in a few days.’ ” That did not happen. As Zhuo eventually learned, the luggage and boxes he had been transporting contained more than two hundred pounds of marijuana, packaged in two hundred and eleven vacuum-sealed bags. Customs and Border Protection agents seized his Toyota Sienna, and a D.E.A. agent filed a criminal complaint in federal court charging him with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. If convicted, he would face a maximum punishment of twenty years in prison.
Smuggling has a long history in Akwesasne, earning it the moniker “the contraband capital.” The St. Lawrence River, which runs through the territory and divides the U.S. and Canada, makes the border there especially difficult to police. During Prohibition, bootleggers brought alcohol into the U.S. by boat; in the eighties and nineties, cigarettes were smuggled north to evade Canadian taxes. The area has a high rate of poverty, and, for some, smuggling became a way of life. James Russell, the Border Patrol agent who first spied Zhuo’s van, later spoke in court about the phenomenon of cross-border smuggling through Akwesasne.
“Tobacco, narcotics, people, firearms—if it can be smuggled and someone can make a dollar off it, you name it, it’s smuggled across there,” he said. “There’s multiple cross-border roads that are unguarded, and it’s just constant traffic.” And when smugglers cross the border in boats, he added, “we can’t do anything about it, just watch it go back and forth.” Marijuana trafficking continued even after the drug was legalized in New York State. Joseph, the agent who stopped Zhuo, said that in his career he’d found it “in railroad cars, mail trucks, pickup trucks, oil trucks or oil drums, backpacks, persons, boats.”
The Border Patrol agents who apprehended Zhuo were assigned to the region known as the Swanton Sector, which includes nearly three hundred miles of the U.S.-Canada border, from northeast New York to New Hampshire. Though illegal crossings of the southern border have received far more attention, the number of people caught trying to cross the northern border also spiked in recent years. In the year leading up to October, 2024, Swanton Sector agents apprehended nearly twenty thousand people—more than the previous seventeen years put together. Sixty-five per cent were from India, twelve per cent were from Mexico, and the rest came from nearly a hundred different countries. On the same day that Zhuo was arrested, two men involved in a human-smuggling operation were trading messages on WhatsApp about four people who needed to be picked up near the border in Clinton County. Both men were later arrested and pleaded guilty.
Prior to his arrest, Zhuo had no experience with the criminal-justice system, and he had only one person trying to help him navigate it—Minxing Zou. She had met Zhuo about twenty years earlier when they were classmates in the same middle school, in China’s Fujian Province. In 2010, when she was a teen-ager, she and her mother had moved to Queens to join her father, who was working as a cook at a Chinese restaurant. Though Minxing had studied English in China, she felt lost in an American high school: “I couldn’t understand anything,” she recalled. To improve her English, she listened to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on her commute to a local public school. The strategy helped. She went on to City College, finishing in 2016, and to graduate school in optometry, eventually working at a city clinic in the Bronx.
She and Zhuo reconnected when she went back to China for a visit in the summer of 2016. His family owned a factory, and he ran a fabric store, but before long Zhuo decided to join her in Queens. A year after, the two married in China, and he obtained a green card. They later separated for a time and divorced, but after a year or so they got back together. “One reason that I really like him is he’s very positive,” Minxing told me. “He has a plan for the future.” In November of 2024, he incorporated an L.L.C. to start a travel company—he called it City Walk—that would provide concierge services for tourists, planning itineraries and purchasing tickets to places like the Statue of Liberty. When he learned that he was going to become a father, she said, he seemed “to have endless energy.” He recalls driving about seven thousand miles a month, sometimes returning home for only a few hours of sleep, trying to earn and save as much money as possible before the baby’s arrival.
Now, from the Clinton County Jail, he would call and give her updates on his situation. Not long after he was arrested, he recognized another person who had been brought into the jail: the man who had loaded the boxes into his car. His name was Eric Montour, he was Mohawk, and he lived north of the border. About thirty minutes before he had met Zhuo, he had driven from Canada into the U.S. (The video-recording system in Zhuo’s van had captured images of Montour and his truck’s Ontario license plate, allowing law enforcement to identify him.)
When Montour had been questioned by law enforcement, he did not divulge details about the marijuana operation he was involved in. Soon after entering Clinton County jail, he was recorded on a jail phone line speaking to someone about receiving financial help to get out as long as he kept his mouth shut.
“You can’t talk . . . you gotta go finish it out,” the man said.
Montour replied, “Bro, I wouldn’t do that to you, man. You know that.”
On February 4, 2025, Zhuo and Montour had video detention hearings inside the jail, one after the other, on the same matter: whether each of them would be released. Zhuo was represented by an attorney from Flushing, Queens, whom Minxing had found, who argued that Zhuo “had no idea what was being loaded” into his minivan and that Zhuo’s decision to retain private counsel reflected his “seriousness and earnestness”: he could be trusted to return to court for “each and every” court date. The federal prosecutor, Douglas G. Collyer, argued that Zhuo should not be freed because of the seriousness of his alleged crime: the prosecutor estimated that Zhuo had been carrying “about half a million dollars in marijuana.”
Zhuo was a legal permanent resident of the U.S., but, Collyer told the court, “there is an immigration detainer for the defendant.” If he were released on bail, Collyer said, ICE would pick him up, and “given the actions of the new Administration, removal from the U.S. is a significantly likely outcome.” The judge denied bail to Zhuo.
Montour, who went next, was represented by Donald T. Kinsella, a well-known litigator who had previously overseen the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Northern District—the same office now prosecuting Montour. Montour, who was forty-seven, had been arrested multiple times in Canada, including once when he led police officers on a high-speed chase and was found to have a strong odor of alcohol on his breath. “I’m not opposed to the idea of release in this case,” the prosecutor told the judge, as long as the defendant goes “from jail to an inpatient treatment facility.” The judge agreed. Three weeks later, Montour was released from jail to enter a rehab program fifty miles away.
In the weeks after Zhuo’s arrest, Minxing, who was scheduled to give birth in mid-February, tried not to cry. “When the mother cries, the baby can feel your emotions,” she said. “I couldn’t pass that bad energy to her.” She called the jail where Zhuo was being held and begged officials to bring him to Queens to witness their baby’s arrival, offering to pay any expenses. She recalled, “I told them, ‘This might be the only child we’re going to have. I don’t want him to miss this moment.’ ”
On February 18, 2025, Minxing gave birth to a daughter they named Selene, at a hospital in Flushing, Queens. Her pleas to Zhuo’s jailers to send him down for the birth had not worked. (“They said sorry, they couldn’t do anything,” she recalls.) Her mother helped care for her newborn, and she continued trying to free Zhuo. She fired the attorney she had hired to represent him—she did not think he was fighting hard enough—and hired another, Todd Henry, who had been recommended by a friend of Zhuo’s father. In May, a grand jury indicted Zhuo for possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute and a second crime: conspiracy to possess and distribute.
Zhuo had advised Minxing to use ChatGPT to try to educate herself about the U.S. legal system, and she had taken to asking the chatbot questions like “Initial hearing, what does it mean?” She would then use the information she obtained to share thoughts and suggestions with Henry about her partner’s case. She could tell that some of her messages irked Henry—“Being on ChatGPT does not make you a lawyer,” he would say—but she continued to rely on ChatGPT, which she came to think of as a “fake lawyer.” “The fake lawyer can’t yell at me, so I can ask anything I want without feeling stupid,” she said.
Throughout the summer and fall of 2025, Zhuo remained in jail, as trial dates were set and pushed back. Investigators had not been able to identify the man who had contacted Zhuo to arrange the pickup. Montour, after three months in rehab, pleaded guilty to possession on November 6th. He remained out of jail while awaiting his sentencing.
On January 30, 2026, after Zhuo had been imprisoned for more than a year, the prosecutor sent an e-mail to Henry, suggesting a way to wrap up the case. “Hi Todd,” Collyer wrote. “I have an idea.” He cited a portion of federal immigration law for drug offenses that states that “any alien” who enters the U.S. and violates a law is “deportable” except for one group: those convicted of “a single offense involving possession for one’s own use of 30 grams or less of marijuana.” The prosecutor proposed having Zhuo plead guilty to this crime, which would enable him to get out of jail and presumably avoid deportation. “Is that acceptable if I can get it approved?” he wrote.
In some ways, the offer was astonishing—a defendant caught with more than two hundred pounds of marijuana was being offered the chance to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Zhuo’s attorney advised him to take the deal and avoid the risk of going to trial. Only about two per cent of federal criminal defendants take their cases to trial, and almost all of those who do are convicted. But Zhuo worried about the possible long-term consequences of a criminal conviction. “I saw in the news that some people were arrested by ICE because of a record they have from thirty years ago,” he later explained. “I don’t want to be separated from my family because of that record.”
Minxing also thought that he should reject the plea deal. “A U.S. Attorney tried to give a deal to a ‘criminal’—a deal, in this kind of political environment, to try to help him stay in the U.S. If he really thinks he’s a real criminal, why would he do that?” she asked. “He already knows—my husband is innocent.”
The federal judge overseeing Zhuo’s case was Glenn T. Suddaby, a former prosecutor who had previously served as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District. On February 11th, Zhuo was brought to Suddaby’s courtroom in Syracuse for a final pretrial conference. A week earlier, the U.S. Attorney’s office had, without explanation, dropped the conspiracy charge against Zhuo. Now the prosecutor told the judge, “We offered Mr. Zhuo a plea to an offense that would not result in his removal from the United States and is a misdemeanor that would result in time served, and it’s my understanding he is rejecting that.”
Judge Suddaby said, “Certainly it doesn’t seem particularly rational to me, rejecting such an offer from the government.”
Henry told the judge, “I understand how nice this offer is.” He added, “I have advised him to take it.”
The judge turned to Zhuo. “Sir,” he said, “it’s your position that you do not want to take advantage of that plea offer?”
“I didn’t do anything, but I was put in jail for four hundred days,” Zhuo said, speaking through a translator. “What I want is justice.”
The judge cut him off: “I don’t want to hear explanations or what your interpretation of your arrest is.” If Zhuo had agreed to plead guilty, he could have been released from jail; instead, he remained there, with his trial set to start the following week.
Minxing asked her uncle to drive her the two hundred and sixty miles to Syracuse to attend the trial. She brought a bag of clothes for Zhuo because she expected that he would be acquitted and released. “I even was thinking where should I take him after this whole mess,” she remembers. Her relatives had advised her that “after this bad luck, you’re supposed to take a shower outside and clean off all this bad luck from you, and then you come back home with clean new luck,” she said. She started thinking about taking Zhuo to a spa to shower before returning to Queens.
His trial started on February 17th. Boxes of the marijuana that had been found in his minivan were displayed in the courtroom, in a cart parked across from the jurors. James Russell, the first Border Patrol agent to notice Zhuo’s van, took the witness stand for the prosecution. The prosecutor had told the jurors that Russell was part of the Border Enforcement Security Task Force—or BEST team—and that he and other team members were on the reservation that day “looking to detect and disrupt international smuggling.” As Russell, who was in an unmarked car, put it, “We simply observe, see suspicious things, relay it to the marked units.” He spoke about smuggling strategies and the challenge of stopping it. Minxing, who sat alone in the spectator section of the courtroom, thought that the agent’s testimony was beside the point. To her, it seemed, the prosecution was “trying to confuse the jurors” about the nature of Zhuo’s case.
The prosecutor called two more agents to the stand—Clinton Joseph, who had arrested Zhuo, and David Gottschall, who had interrogated Zhuo. At trial, Gottschall estimated the street value of the marijuana to be a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars—down from the half-million figure the prosecutor had given earlier. Partway through Gottschall’s testimony, there was a break in the proceeding.
The lawyers approached the judge’s bench to discuss how much longer the trial would go. Judge Suddaby had made it clear that he wanted the proceedings to be as efficient as possible. Henry had submitted the names of two potential witnesses—a friend of Zhuo’s and one of his relatives—but he had since decided against calling them. “This is the last witness,” Henry said to the judge. “You can tell them”—the jurors—“we’re ahead of schedule.”
The sidebar ended, and Judge Suddaby addressed the jurors: “Good news. There’s not a lot left, O.K.? I told you it was going to be short and sweet. So we’re going to break for the day. I’m going to let you get out of here early. How about that? That never happens.”
The following day, the jurors would confront the central matter of the case—precisely what Zhuo understood about the boxes and luggage in the minivan during the half hour after he picked them up. In the courtroom, the prosecutor showed Zhuo’s rearview-mirror camera footage in one-minute increments—that was how it had been recorded. Instead of subtitles, jurors were provided with written summaries, such as, “Zhuo says that he (Zhuo) is driving back now. UM”—unidentified male, the customer on the phone—“says his (UM) stuff is in Zhuo’s van.”
The crime Zhuo had been charged with—possession with the intent to distribute—requires a few elements, including that the accused actually know that he is in possession of a controlled substance. Henry insisted his client did not know: “He never says, ‘This is marijuana.’ ” Zhuo wonders if there “might be” marijuana in the boxes behind him, he said during his closing argument, but “ ‘might be’ doesn’t rise to the standard.” He added: “It can’t be ‘I’m suspicious.’ It can’t be ‘I assume.’ It can’t be ‘It’s probably this.’ ” He reminded the jury that Zhuo had coöperated with law enforcement, turning over his phone and explaining how his video-recording system works: “Those are not the actions of a guilty person. He doesn’t know, and because he doesn’t know, you all must find him not guilty.”
But, in this trial, Zhuo and his attorney confronted an especially steep challenge in a legal doctrine known as willful blindness (or conscious avoidance), which broadens the range of scenarios in which a defendant can be found culpable. The principle expands the definition of knowledge to include not only instances in which one knows he possesses a controlled substance but also those instances in which one strongly suspects he may but does not take further steps to investigate.
During his closing argument, Collyer, the prosecutor, said of Zhuo, “He repeatedly uses the word ‘marijuana.’ He talks about how the boxes smell. He doesn’t check the boxes because that would mean confirming that it’s marijuana. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is textbook conscious avoidance.” He added, “Even if you’re not convinced that he knew what he was transporting and was going to distribute was marijuana . . . he’s still guilty if he deliberately closed his eyes to the truth.”
The judge’s instructions to the jurors were more nuanced: he said they could find that Zhuo knew there was marijuana in his minivan if they determined that his “ignorance” was “solely and entirely the result of a conscious purpose to avoid learning the truth”—but not if they concluded that he was “merely negligent, foolish, or mistaken.” The government also needed to prove an additional element of the crime, which received far less attention during the trial: intent to distribute. Were the jurors certain that Zhuo intended to hand off the boxes to someone at the Manhattan address he had been given? Or did they think that, in the next six hours, he might decide to do something else with them? “The government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt,” the judge explained, that “the defendant intended to distribute the controlled substance.”
The jurors deliberated for three and a half hours before the foreperson announced their verdict: “Guilty.”
That night, Minxing took a bus from Syracuse back to New York City, and the couple spoke on the phone. “He was crying, and then I was crying, and then he questioned how and why this happened, and we couldn’t understand,” she told me later. “I told him that we will try to figure this out. And then I said, ‘You know, you are innocent, and we will fight to the end no matter how long it takes.’ ” It was their daughter Selene’s first birthday, and he still had not met her in person, because he didn’t want that moment to happen in a jail.
Shortly after Zhuo’s arrest, John A. Sarcone III, a Donald Trump loyalist, had taken over the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District. After Zhuo’s conviction, the Northern District issued a press release with a headline that misrepresented the facts of the case: “Chinese National Found Guilty of Smuggling 207 Pounds of Marijuana into the United States.” Zhuo had not actually been found guilty of smuggling marijuana into the country; there were no allegations that he had crossed the border or knew the man who had loaded his car. The release included a quote from Sarcone: “For far too long, criminal networks have exploited the Akwesasne Mohawk Indian Reservation as a gateway for smuggling illegal drugs into our country. We will not tolerate anyone using this border region as a safe haven for trafficking.”
While Zhuo awaits his sentencing, he is being held at the Madison County jail in Wampsville, New York, not far from Syracuse. When I went to visit him there in May, he wore a uniform that was the same shade of orange as a traffic cone: matching shirt, pants, undershirt, socks. When I asked him about it and about the thick plastic I.D. bracelet he was forced to wear, he dropped his head. “I feel ashamed. I want to reclaim my dignity,” he said. “I have never been in this situation before.”
We sat in a very small room with cinder-block walls, a locked door, and a square table in the corner with a telephone on it; there was a Mandarin translator on the line facilitating the interview. Zhuo had brought with him a black-and-white steno notebook with page after page of writing in Mandarin. “This is my story,” he told me. He had written neatly, filling every line, and amid the Mandarin words, I saw a few familiar abbreviations: C.B.P., D.E.A., D.H.S., D.O.J., ICE.
Madison County’s jail is the fourth location he has been held in since his arrest. “The first six months, I had nightmares every night,” he told me. “I can’t understand why I’m being locked up for so long, and I can’t understand why this has anything to do with me.” He had met another incarcerated man who spoke Mandarin at each of the first two jails, but he had not found anyone he could communicate with at Madison County. He spends his days in silence, passing the hours by jogging in the jail yard or writing in his steno notebook.
In the days after he was convicted, he sent dozens of legal questions to Minxing from an electronic tablet that he could use in jail. He could not write on the tablet in Mandarin, so instead he wrote in Pinyin—the transliteration of Mandarin using the Latin alphabet. She would feed his questions into ChatGPT, collect the answers, and send them back to him so that he could try to figure out what his legal options were.
When I asked Zhuo about his mental health, he sighed. “I don’t know what to say. I feel especially lost because my life plan was to be with my daughter right now at my own home, but I spent all my life savings to fight a battle that wasn’t mine to begin with,” he said. The invoice for Henry’s work had been sixty thousand dollars, the government had never returned his minivan, and Zhuo was still stuck in jail with no promise he would get out anytime soon. A month after the trial, Minxing hired a new lawyer to work on an appeal—Patrick Brackley, a veteran defense attorney in Manhattan.
Assisting Brackley is an attorney named Thomas Eddy, who, in 1981, as a student at SUNY Binghamton, was convicted of selling two ounces of cocaine to a classmate and his friend. Eddy served thirteen years in state prison before Governor Mario Cuomo commuted his sentence. Both he and Brackley have been emphatic about their client’s innocence. Eddy says, “Here is a guy who doesn’t speak the language; he’s in a part of the country he’s never been before; he gets a bunch of boxes dumped on him and tries to figure out what’s going on. The government is faulting him for not figuring out what to do fast enough.”
In arguing for Zhuo’s imprisonment, the prosecutor wrote that Zhuo had “every opportunity to disavow the marijuana by turning it into the police or leaving it on the side of the road.” Eddy finds that implausible. “Nobody can show up at a police station with two hundred pounds of weed and say, ‘I don’t know who gave it to me.’ C’mon! They’re not letting you out,” he told me. About the thirty or so minutes that elapsed while the boxes sat in his minivan, Eddy says of Zhuo, “He’s driving. His wife is two weeks from delivering. It’s all overwhelming. Who’s thinking clearly?” Eddy has been writing motions on Zhuo’s behalf, trying to undo his conviction and prevent him from either being sent to federal prison or being deported.
Today, Zhuo remains at the Madison County jail, awaiting the day when he will be taken to court to be sentenced. He turned thirty-two years old while incarcerated, and then thirty-three. By mid-July, he had been confined for nearly five hundred and fifty days. When I visited him, it was evident that he had been thinking quite a bit about his fate. He told me, “I believe in the law in the U.S. That’s why I came here. If there is not law, why did I come here? What would be the difference between here and China?” ♦