A U.S. Judge Clears an Accused Fentanyl Broker to Seek His Witness in China — and to Ask Beijing for Help

Over the Justice Department's objections, a federal court in Texas authorized sworn testimony from a witness in Shenzhen.

HOUSTON — For more than a year, the prosecution of Minsu Fang has stood as a showcase of the evolving front in America’s fentanyl war — a case that investigators say runs from a Texas warehouse through Mexican cartels and back to the chemical suppliers of China. In the government’s telling, it also documents something larger. Chinese suppliers had come to recognize that the Mexican military, under pressure from Washington, had hardened the southern border against fentanyl smuggling, and that the nexus of Mexican cartels and upstream Chinese chemical suppliers would have to adapt — rerouting their trade through clandestine trans-shipment and false packaging.

The case cuts to the heart of a charge pressed by American lawmakers: that Beijing is not a bystander to the fentanyl crisis but a deliberate author of it. At a hearing on transnational repression on June 4, Representative Christopher H. Smith, co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, placed “fentanyl poisoning our cities” within what he called “a broader, interconnected CCP strategy” — a set of seemingly separate assaults that, in his words, “share a common purpose: exploit our openness, gather leverage, weaken our institutions.”

Last week the Texas case produced what may be an extraordinary precedent. A federal judge agreed to the unusual request of the accused broker — Minsu “Fernando” Fang — allowing him to reach into China for the testimony he says will exonerate him, and to ask the Chinese state for help in obtaining it.

At a hearing on May 28, Judge Keith P. Ellison granted Fang’s request to question a witness who can be reached only inside China, brushing aside the objections of prosecutors who had argued in a detailed brief that the testimony would be unreliable, beside the point, and cause delays in a critical matter. Fang’s lawyers told the judge they would pursue the deposition through a formal request for judicial assistance — addressed to the Ministry of Justice of the People’s Republic of China.

The ruling reorders a case the government has treated as a milestone victory. Fang, 48, was arrested in June 2024 as he prepared to board a flight from New York to Mexico City, roughly a year after drug agents in Texas seized some 2,500 kilograms of chemical precursors in one of the largest fentanyl-related busts in the country’s history.

For the U.S. government, Fang is a rare capture: not a sanctioned factory or an unarrestable name on a sanctions list, but a living broker who allegedly stitched Chinese precursor suppliers to Mexican cartels, re-routing chemicals by mislabeled parcel through the United States and onward to Mexico.

It is a case that speaks to recent testimony from the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, and the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, who have argued that the United States has significantly hardened the southern border and aggressively targeted cartel kingpins in Mexico. Where Chinese suppliers once shipped fentanyl precursors by the container into Mexico’s Pacific coast, the Chinese-Mexican narco convergence has evolved its smuggling routes through trans-shipment, with the route described in Fang’s case a plausible example, even as Patel and Cole have pointed to Vancouver and Canada’s border with the United States as the newest concern.

“We charged this defendant for importing enough fentanyl precursor chemicals from China to kill millions of Americans,” Merrick Garland, the attorney general at the time, said when the Fang indictment was unsealed. The superseding indictment charges Fang with conspiracies to manufacture and distribute fentanyl and to import and export a precursor the government identifies as 1-Boc-4P.

Fang says he is a freight man who was deceived. His defense rests on a single witness in Shenzhen: Wu Xincheng, a former freight-business partner who, in an affidavit notarized in China, swears that the two of them believed they were moving lawful goods. “I know from my first involvement in this matter that Mr. Fang believed, at all times, that his conduct was not illegal or improper, and that the goods he was attempting to move were legal substances,” Wu states. “We believed this to be true based on the representations that were made by LIU, Tao, specifically that the chemicals he was trying to cross into Mexico were to be used to make cosmetics and were not controlled substances. I had no reason to know that the goods shipped were illegal in any way and to my knowledge, neither did Mr. Fang.”

That account is the heart of what the defense calls exceptional circumstances. Wu is a Chinese national beyond the reach of an American subpoena, and, his lawyers argue, the only person who can describe from the inside what Fang knew and believed as the shipments moved.

The government’s answer was to turn Fang’s own messages against him — and in doing so it disclosed the most revealing new evidence in the case. Across years of WeChat exchanges with Wu, prosecutors wrote, the two men “often referred to the chemicals as ‘sensitive goods,’” and discussed how “Mexican military and police had a full presence along the Mexican border and were detaining goods.” In August 2023, according to the filing, Fang told Wu that a package had been seized and the “DEA is investigating.” Rather than retreat, the men “worked to find other couriers and warehouses that would accept the powders and liquids.” And on September 20, 2023, prosecutors say, Fang told Wu plainly what the cargo was for: the powders and chemicals were used “to manufacture prohibited substances,” “like fentanyl and such.”