In May 2017, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bodyguards and supporters attacked Lucy Usoyan on a Washington, D.C. street, outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence, just ten minutes from the White House. 

“It was very quick and unexpected,” Lucy Usoyan told me over the phone. “You never expect to be under the foot of a president’s bodyguard.” U.S. State Department documents obtained by Usoyan’s lawyers indicate that Erdogan witnessed the attack and may have ordered it to be carried out.

Authoritarian regimes are increasingly ignoring the sovereignty of other nations to lash out at dissent abroad or locate and punish citizens who have found refuge in another country. In what experts label “transnational repression,” governments like Erdogan’s are intimidating people through online disinformation campaigns and, increasingly, by physically targeting them for violence.

The U.S. Congress has responded by introducing a bill designed to crack down on the targeting of Americans by foreign regimes. The Stop Transnational Repression Act, which aims to define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law, would impose a maximum 10-year sentence for those convicted of the crime.