The U.S. Justice Department has filed charges against 40 members of China's national police for their involvement in a concerted effort to harass U.S. residents through targeted campaigns, reports said on Monday.

According to NTD, documents the DoJ released this week revealed that 40 officials from China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and two individuals from the Cyberspace Administration of China collaborated to carry out harassment against dissidents and pro-democracy activists residing in the United States and other parts of the world. The officials also plotted to transmit interstate threats as part of their campaign, the news outlet reported.

As per the DoJ documents, the MPS officers involved in the harassment campaign belong to a specialized task force in China called the "912 Special Project Working Group," which is commonly referred to as "the Group." According to the DoJ, the Group's purported objective is to silence Chinese dissidents on an international level through targeting and harassment tactics.

"The Chinese government deploys an elite task force of its national police—the 912 Special Project Working Group—as a troll farm to attack Chinese dissidents in our country for exercising free speech that the [Chinese communist] government disfavors, and spread disinformation and propaganda to sow divisions within the United States," noted U.S. Attorney Breon Peace during a news conference.

The defendants are accused of executing sophisticated and coordinated transnational repression operations that aimed to target U.S. residents with political beliefs that are regarded as unacceptable by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which governs China as a one-party state.