Representative Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the new House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, rallied a bipartisan group of lawmakers, alongside Chinese dissidents and human-rights advocates, in front of the alleged Chinese police station in New York City.

As recently as last fall, the existence of the Chinese government police outpost, run by the city of Fuzhou’s public-security bureau in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was unknown to most Americans. But earlier today, it became the center of a highly attended event in downtown New York where CCP opponents called out the Chinese regime’s totalitarianism.

Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democratic committee member who represents a district in the Bronx, emphasized the unified message at the center of the rally.

“We’re sending a powerful message that the defense of human rights from the abuses of the CCP is not a Democratic value or a Republican value. It’s an American value,” he said.

“We know that the transnational policing is not actually about the solving of crimes, it’s about the systematic surveillance and suppression of political dissidents,” he later added.

Representatives from a number of Chinese dissident groups — as well as advocates for populations targeted by CCP repression such as Uyghurs, Mongolians, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans — also attended the event. Representative Neal Dunn, another member of the counter-CCP committee, also spoke, pointing out that “the number-one victims of the CCP is the Chinese people.”

The police station’s existence was brought to light by the human-rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders in a report last fall, finding that other such outposts have been involved in harassment and stalking plots targeting Chinese nationals overseas. Since then, the FBI has reportedly searched the facility, and the State Department has said that the police station closed.

Equipping law enforcement to more effectively counter foreign transnational repression schemes of the sort that Chinese overseas police are involved in was a main focus of the event. Over the past year, the Justice Department has brought cases against several individuals implicated in stalking schemes across the U.S., including in New York. In one case, Chinese spies tried to order a car crash to take out Xiong Yan, a former congressional candidate who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Gallagher said that it’s critical that FBI field offices across the country be trained to deal with Chinese transnational repression. In recent years, the bureau has stepped up its investigations of foreign countries’ repression on U.S. soil, setting up a tip page dedicated to such activities.

“It needs to be local police trained on this as well,” Gallagher added. “If a victim is brave enough to come forward, no repressive act orchestrated by a foreign government should ever fall on deaf ears.”

In his remarks at the event, Chinese dissident and Tiananmen Square protest leader Fengsuo Zhou echoed that point, calling the rally “just a starting point.”

“We need more activities like this. We need more victims to speak out,” he said.