Judge Blocks Trump's WeChat Ban

Late Saturday, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Trump’s executive order limiting access to the WeChat messaging app in the United States.

The order had been scheduled to take effect at 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled, based on the evidence presented in part at a Saturday hearing, that the order was a burden on protected speech of U.S. WeChat users.

She found that although the government had identified significant national security interests for its action, the order was not “narrowly tailored” to protecting those interests.

The preliminary injunction will preserve the status quo, pending trial on the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims.

WeChat began in China as a messaging app and over the years added additional functionality, including voice calling, video conferencing, and in-app payments. Because of the many functions integrated within the app, plaintiffs described it as a “super-app”.

WeChat is estimated to have more than a billion users worldwide, including 19 million in the United States, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint.

In San Francisco, the Chinese Progressive Association, grassroots organizers and politicians agree that a ban on WeChat would reduce access to a major communication tool within the city’s monolingual Chinese community, particularly in Chinatown.

KQED previously reported that Chinese tenants often depend on WeChat as a Chinese-language organizing tool to rally against big landlords like Veritas.

The plaintiffs, a nonprofit called the WeChat Users Alliance, cited KQED’s reporting, among other news stories, in their arguments against Trump’s WeChat ban.

The reprieve for WeChat comes a day after TikTok, an app owned by ByteDance, a company based in China, was rescued in a last-minute deal approved by Trump in which software company Oracle will serve as a custodian of U.S. user data, with a major investment from Walmart.

In its arguments against the WeChat Users Alliance, the U.S. Attorney’s Office contended that the app is used by the Chinese government for surveillance and data collection within the U.S. and that the order was a justified exercise of the president’s national security powers against a “foreign adversary whose hostile acts are undisputed, and whose aspirations for global dominance are undisputed.”

The order, as subsequently interpreted by the U.S. Commerce Department, imposed a number of limitations and prohibitions on WeChat and third parties, including prohibiting new downloads of the WeChat app, stopping the transfer of funds out of the U.S. and forbidding the provision of technical services to WeChat by third parties.

The department’s interpretation limited the order to
business-to-business transactions, not to “WeChat users who use the app for personal communications.”

The plaintiffs contended that by prohibiting third-party services such as web hosting and internet transit services, WeChat would be effectively shut down, depriving millions of Chinese-speaking Americans of the primary platform they use to communicate and interact with friends and family in China.

They also pointed to the Trump’s numerous anti-China statements made before he issued the order against WeChat, including his reference to the coronavirus as the “China virus” and the “kung-flu.”

The government disputed that the order amounted to a shutdown, but conceded that the order would likely, over time, lead to a “deterioration of functionality.”

The judge found that as a result of the order “the app, while perhaps technically available to existing U.S. users, likely will be useless to them.” Beeler determined that a preliminary injunction was needed to protect plaintiffs from “irreparable harm.”

The Trump administration has not said whether it intends to appeal the order.

This article contains additional reporting from NPR.