Trump presses Chinese President Xi Jinping on jailed Catholic Jimmy Lai’s release

(LifeSiteNews) — The daughter of jailed Catholic activist Jimmy Lai has expressed hope regarding her father’s release from prison after President Donald Trump said he raised the issue with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

During an Oval Office meeting last week, Trump was asked by The Daily Signal reporter Elizabeth Mitchell whether he had discussed “the release of political prisoners such as American Min Zin and Jimmy Lai” during his recent meeting with Xi.

BIG NEWS: @POTUS tells @DailySignal he had “hopefully fruitfully” discussions with Xi about political prisoners in China, including American Min Zin and Jimmy Lai.

“We talked, and I think we had some very, very important discussions. Hopefully, fruitful discussions.” https://t.co/3hCoTNgXgI

— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) September 30, 2026

“I did with President Xi,” Trump said.

“We talked, ⁠and I think we had some very, very important discussions,” he added. “Hopefully, ⁠fruitful discussions.”

Lai’s daughter Claire told The Daily Wire, “He [Trump] and his administration have again shown their continued commitment to securing my father’s freedom.”

“This gives me a great deal of confidence that it is under President Trump’s leadership that my father will be freed and [I] look forward to the day we see him again,” she added.

“My father is a man who believed in the rights we were promised and defended them when it was perfectly legal to do so,” she stated. “He wishes only now to spend his twilight years serving Our Lord with his family. As he said in the letter I shared first with The Daily Wire, he reminded me that ‘we must be thankful to God and serve Him together faithfully.’”

Claire Lai was diagnosed with cancer this year and is currently undergoing treatment in the United Kingdom. She told The Daily Wire the hardest thing for her has been hearing how her father was “crying whenever he talks about it” after he learned her diagnosis.

As reported extensively by LifeSiteNews, Jimmy Lai, a successful businessman and devout Catholic, was punished for his opposition to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He was charged in 2020 with “collusion with foreign forces” in violation of the draconian National Security Law (NSL) imposed by Beijing on Hong Kong in order to suppress dissent against the CCP. Lai’s tabloid, Apple Daily, published criticism of the CCP, prompting retaliation from the communist authorities.

Critics have denounced the recent 20-year sentencing of Lai, the harshest yet imposed under the NSL, as especially cruel given that 78-year-old Lai is likely to die in prison due to his age and ill health.

Lai escaped from China to Hong Kong as a child and became a self-made businessman. He founded Apple Daily in 1995. The paper became one of the leading newspapers in Hong Kong but closed its doors in June 2021 when the offices were raided by CCP security personnel, and Lai was arrested.

Lai’s arrest and subsequent jail sentence caused international outrage. The U.S. State Department issued an October 2022 statement in which it deplored the Chinese National Security Law’s “systematic dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy” and called for a restoration of “respect for press freedom in Hong Kong, where a once-vibrant independent media environment has all but disappeared.”

Trump already discussed Lai’s case with Xi during his visit to China in the spring. He told reporters in May that releasing the 78-year-old Chinese businessman would be a “tough one.” In a separate interview with Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier, he said he was “not optimistic” about Lai’s potential release.