WASHINGTON — After the White House secured the release of WNBA star and Houston native Brittney Griner from Russian prison in early December — the U.S.’s second prisoner swap of the year with Russia — it committed to bringing home all other Americans wrongfully detained abroad.
Now that the Biden administration has shown it is willing to engineer deals to secure the safe return of U.S. nationals, relatives of and advocates for other Texans currently detained or held hostage abroad, including journalist Austin Tice and former Green Berets Airan Berry and Luke Denman, are pushing anew for them to come home in 2023.
Griner was not the only American — or even the only Texan, at one point — Russia has wrongfully detained, a designation the Department of State reserves for cases in which the circumstances of the detainee’s detention suggest they were arrested on discriminatory or arbitrary grounds.
Though the State Department has not released an official tally of how many Americans are being unjustly held by foreign governments, researchers at a wrongful detainee advocacy organization, the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, say the number has risen sharply in recent decades.
“Over the last 10 years we’ve seen a 175 percent increase in incidents of Americans being wrongfully detained,” Cynthia T. Loertscher, the director of research, hostage advocacy, and government affairs for the Foley Foundation, told The New York Times.
On the list is Houston native Tice, a former U.S. Marine who was abducted in Syria in August 2012 shortly after his 31st birthday. He was working as a freelance investigative journalist for The Washington Post, CBS News and McClatchy newspapers, among other organizations, before he disappeared in Damascus at a checkpoint.
Tice has not been heard from since — save for a 43-second video released five weeks after his disappearance titled “Austin Tice is Alive,” which showed him held by a group of unidentified armed men, according to Tice’s family. In it, Tice is blindfolded and can be heard saying, “Oh, Jesus.”
His parents, Debra and Marc Tice, and U.S. government officials remain convinced that Tice is not only alive, but being detained by the Syrian government, something President Joe Biden declared publicly for the first time in August.
After Griner’s release, Tice’s family urged the National Security Council to act on Biden’s May 2nd directive to “meet with the Syrians, listen to them, find out what they want, and work with them.”
“If the US government can work with Russia, there is no excuse for not directly engaging Syria,” his family said in a statement directed largely at Biden’s national security adviser. “We renew our call to Jake Sullivan and his national security team to carry out the President’s orders. God willing, Austin will not spend another Christmas alone in captivity.”
Austin native Denman and Berry, who grew up in Fort Worth, are among at least four U.S. citizens currently detained in Venezuela. In August 2020, Denman and Berry were sentenced to 20 years in prison for their part in a failed beach attack aimed at overthrowing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Michigan native Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine and corporate security executive jailed in Russia since December 2018 on espionage charges that his family and the U.S. government have said are baseless, is still in Russian jail.
“We will not relent in our efforts to bring Paul and all other U.S. nationals held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad home to their loved ones where they belong,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement after Griner’s release.
Trevor Reed, a Fort Worth native and Marine veteran, was imprisoned in Russia for almost three years before the Biden administration organized a trade to secure Reed’s freedom in April. Since his release, Reed has been an outspoken advocate for Americans detained abroad.
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