The problem as I see it is that people who screech about how "just following orders isn't a defense" when people they don't sympathize with violate this or that

The problem as I see it is that people who screech about how "just following orders isn't a defense" when people they don't sympathize with violate this or that regulatory compliance statute without harming anyone are acting as though it's a valid defense when it's someone they sympathize with. This behavior is made doubly odious because a large subset of these same people are often in favor of strict enforcement of somewhat arbitrary rules (like a disclosure requirement on an application) against people they don't sympathize with. This inability to have principals and be consistent with them is going to bite our country a lot harder than the occasional foreign scientist lying on a grant application or the occasional foreign scientist getting wrongfully prosecuted. To be clear, I sympathize with Mr Hu. I think the organization should be getting punished here. He brought the issue to their attention and they advised him to do exactly the wrong thing and the feds screwed him for it. People, especially foreign nationals who cannot be expected to be well versed in US law, need to have a reasonable expectation that they can follow orders from HR/Legal/their boss in matters of mundane statutory compliance without getting personally screwed when the actions they took in confidence violated the law. UT is responsible for what happened to Mr. Hu and in a perfect world that would be a slam dunk tort. But his plight is just a drop in the bucket of a much larger societal problem.