WASHINGTON — Grace Drexel felt a “glimmer of hope” when President Trump said he would bring up her father’s detention in China when he meets with President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week.
“This president has just a remarkable way of doing things that most people say are impossible,” she told The Post. “If anyone, this president might be able to bring back my father.”
Ezra Jin, a Christian pastor and father of US citizens, was arrested in October as part of a massive Chinese crackdown on religious institutions.
Drexel is expecting her third child in four weeks and hopes her father will be free in time to meet his newest grandchild.
“A week before my father was detained, we just told my dad that we got pregnant, and it was so early that we weren’t sharing it widely or anything like that. And we’re really grateful that we are actually able to tell my dad about the baby before he was in prison,” she said.
“It’s like this baby has kind of walked through it all with us since the beginning.”
Trump has made the return of detained Americans a priority for his administration.
As of May 2026, the president has secured the release of over 100 American hostages and detainees held abroad.
“I’ve gotten a lot of people out of different countries, including China,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “So we’ll take a look at that,” he added of Jin’s case.
Drexel, who lives in Washington, DC, said she was coming home from dinner when she heard what the president said and was so excited she missed several stops on the metro and had to retrace her steps.
The Jins are not the only family hoping the president will make the case for their loved one’s freedom.
Dawn Michelle Hunt has been in Guangdong Women’s Prison since her 2014 arrest. Her family says she’s the victim of a drug trafficking scheme.
Tim Hunt, Dawn’s brother, told The Post how he promised their father, before his death in January, that he would see his sister brought home.
Trump “is a father,” Hunt noted. “He’d be fighting tooth and nail for his kids. I gotta fight tooth and nail for my dad, who would fight tooth and nail for his kids.”
The State Department is working on both cases. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and several lawmakers have called for Jin’s release and criticized China for targeting Christians. The department also asked Xi’s government to release Hunt for humanitarian reasons — citing serious health issues.
“We take our commitment to assist Americans abroad seriously and are providing consular assistance,” a State Department spokesperson told The Post. “The Department of State, including the U.S. Mission in China, unwaveringly advocates for the health and welfare of all US citizens detained in China.”
Jin is the founder and pastor of Zion Church, a large “underground house church” with congregations across China. Religious practice is legal in China but tightly controlled by the government, which registers “official” state-sanctioned churches.
He founded the Zion Church in 2007 in Beijing while his family was still living in China. In 2018, amid a pressure campaign, he and his family moved to the US, but Jin returned to China later that year while his family stayed behind.
Drexel said the family has not heard from her father in some time. Letters and phone calls are not allowed. And their lawyers in China have become targets of the government.
“Our lawyers have been targeted, and several, like my father’s main lawyer, has gotten his license permanently revoked, and his whole law firm was dismantled, quote, unquote, voluntarily,” she said.
Dawn Michelle Hunt has been in a Chinese prison for a dozen years.
The Chicago native loved to travel and enter raffle contests. She thought she hit the jackpot when she was informed by email that she won a trip abroad. Thrilled, she researched the company to make sure it wasn’t a scam and found it appeared legitimate.
The trip started well. She spent a week in Hong Kong without incident, then moved on to China, where she was informed she could also travel to Australia.
Given the smoothness of her experience, she accepted. She was given some designer bags — part of her win, she was told, according to her family.
But what she didn’t know was that sewn in the lining of the bags were several kilos of methamphetamines.
When she was at the airport, waiting for her flight to Australia, she was approached by police. It was 2014. Instead of Australia, she was sent to a Chinese prison and sentenced to death. That was later commuted to life in prison.
Since her incarceration, she’s developed fibroids and tumors in her uterus, believed to be a symptom of cancer. She has refused Chinese medical treatment out of fear, her brother said, because she can’t understand the Cantonese medical forms that she would have to sign.
Besides hampering her physically, her illness is keeping her from earning time off her sentence, her brother Tim Hunt said.
“She’s been unable to work,” he said. “In the China system, it’s rehabilitation through labor. So she has not been able to get time knocked off of her sentence.”
“Usually when you work, it goes from life to maybe 20 to 12. She can’t work,” he said.
Prisoners earn points through their work, which can go toward knocking time off their sentences. The few points Dawn earns, she uses for phone calls to her family. Letters and other mail haven’t been allowed since the COVID pandemic.
Tim Hunt, a retired police officer, visited his sister two years ago. He was given an hour with her, but a Chinese official was in the room with them the whole time, taking notes.
He expressed his concern for her health, noting she had a tumor the size of a grapefruit on her right side.
“She did not look too good at all,” he said. The photo on her prison ID was the one taken when she was arrested. Compared to what she looked like to him, “it looked like two different people.”
And then there’s his late father.
Gene Hunt worked tirelessly to free his daughter and managed to visit her in prison before he died, a trip that strengthened his resolve to free her, his son said.
Tim Hunt, nicknamed “number one” as he’s the eldest of the three Hunt children, said he promised his father he wouldn’t rest until Dawn was free.
“My dad just passed away, January 25, and I made a promise to him to bring her home. My dad said, from the last time I talked to him, as long as my number one is on that I’m at peace,” he said.
Hunt believes an appeal on the presidential level will persuade the Chinese to release his sister on humanitarian grounds, as the State Department has requested of Xi’s government.
“If it was one of his family members, one of his sons or one of his daughters, he would do whatever it took, whatever is necessary, to bring him home,” Hunt said of Trump.
“That’s his makeup, that’s his ethos. And I’m just asking that if he could for me, just ask President Xi to bring her home.”
