Report: Parts of hate crimes act not in effect yet

In the East Room of the White House on May 20, 2021, US President Joe Biden thanked lawmakers for passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act in response to the surge of attacks on Asian Americans during the pandemic.

However, the act has been poorly implemented, according to a news report.

The act seeks to bolster hate-crime reporting by giving resources to state and local law enforcement authorities to report attacks as they happen.

"My message to all of those who are hurting is: We see you and the Congress has said, we see you. And we are committed to stop the hatred and the bias," the president said when he signed the bill.

On Jan 19, more than 18 months after the bill's signing, the administration issued a 30-page report about how it is implementing the act to advance equity, justice and opportunity for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.

But USA Today said it has found that key initiatives of the act have yet to be launched, while Asian Americans have experienced an increase in violence.

The FBI didn't report an increase in hate crimes affecting the Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in the months after the bill passed, the newspaper reported.

The incidents that were recorded in the agency's public database were only a small fraction of what has been reported to state authorities and the nonprofit organization Stop AAPI Hate, USA Today said.

The bill establishes grants for states to create state-run hate crimes reporting hot lines, but they haven't been implemented, and when they are distributed in March, only two states will benefit, USA Today reported.

The bill authorized the Justice Department to use grants to help local agencies report crimes through federal systems, but USA Today said the department didn't provide it with information on those efforts.

There was no immediate response from the administration to the report.

"In government, things do take time," said Krystal Ka‘ai, executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. "To truly root out hate, you cannot just simply sign a policy or issue a directive and things just change overnight."

Nearly 11,500 hate incidents were reported to Stop AAPI Hate's reporting center between March 19, 2020, and March 31, 2022.

Harassment is a major problem, as 2 in 3 (67 percent) of the nearly 11,500 incidents involved harassment, such as verbal or written hate speech or inappropriate gestures, said the national coalition aimed at addressing anti-Asian discrimination.

While the act is a government step to stop discrimination against Asian Americans, there are US policies that are geared to restraining China economically, such as the CHIPS and Science Act, which Biden signed into law in August.

The act provides roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of chips in the US. It provided more than $52 billion into semiconductor and other scientific research, with the objective of countering China.

The Biden administration also is considering cutting off Huawei Technologies from all of its American suppliers, including Intel and Qualcomm, as the US government intensifies a crackdown on the Chinese technology sector, according to a report on bloomberg.com, which cited people familiar with the matter.

"All this cutting off access to the China market is going to ultimately also impact the US ability to do innovation because those companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, they're deriving a huge amount of their revenue from access to the China market," said Paul Triolo, senior vice-president for China and technology policy lead at Albright Stonebridge Group, in October.

"If they're cut off, that's going to impact their R&D budgets, and impact their ability to continue to innovate," he said.

Support for an aggressive approach toward China is found in both major political parties in Congress, and now with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, it has shown signs of increasing.

On Jan 31, Biden said the US and Netherlands were working in "lockstep" over their approach to China and would discuss ways to secure global supply chains during a meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte at the White House.

"Together we're working on how to keep a free and open Indo-Pacific. And quite frankly, meet the challenges of China," Biden said at the meeting.

Japan also has reportedly taken the same approach on technology exports as the Netherlands, but Japanese makers of semiconductor manufacturing machinery and materials used to make chips said on Monday they had yet to hear from Tokyo about export restrictions that could directly or indirectly affect their business in China.

Lia Zhu in San Francisco and Reuters contributed to this story.