In 2020, a Chinese citizen had heard reports about China’s mass detention and surveillance of Uyghurs. But he wanted to see if they were true for himself.
So the citizen, Heng Guan, 38, said that he made a hugely risky decision, driving across the country from eastern China to Xinjiang, where he tracked down and secretly shot video of hulking re-education and detention centers mostly holding Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic group. The footage later became rare visual evidence of the scale and forcible nature of China’s clampdown, despite Beijing’s claims that they were voluntary re-education camps.
In 2021, Mr. Guan fled to the United States, where he applied for asylum. Then, this August, as he was living in New York, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His supporters and family members feared he might be sent back to China, where human rights activists say he would almost certainly face retribution from the government.
On Monday, after a public outcry, the Trump administration moved to continue deportation proceedings against Mr. Guan, but argued that he should be sent to Uganda, which has close economic ties to China.
At a virtual immigration hearing on Monday, Niles Gerry, a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security, cited an agreement that allows asylum seekers in the United States who might face persecution in their home country to be removed to what the government calls safe third countries, where they can apply for asylum. Administration officials, under pressure from President Trump to carry out mass deportations, have moved swiftly to resume third-country deportations after the Supreme Court cleared the practice in July.
Mr. Guan’s case underscores the immense breadth of Mr. Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which is ensnaring even those who would appear to have obvious claims to asylum.
The Chinese government’s wide-scale repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang — and the extreme lengths to which officials have gone to distort or stymie any information about its efforts in the region — has been the subject of numerous international media investigations and human rights reports in recent years.
China and Uganda share strong economic and defense ties, and the two governments have also promoted their cooperation on fighting crime. And Mr. Guan’s lawyer, Chuangchuang Chen, said that, given that close relationship, Mr. Guan would be in great danger in Uganda.
“It’s more likely than not for such a highly sensitive person like Mr. Guan that Uganda would send him back to China,” Mr. Chen said in a telephone interview after the hearing.
The Persecution of Uyghurs in China
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A History of Tension For decades, the Chinese government has treated the Uyghurs, an ethnic group of about 12 million people in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, as a troublesome population with separatist tendencies.
Who Are the Uyghurs? The Uyghurs are a Central Asian, mostly Muslim, people, who speak their own Turkic language.
Targeting Muslims China used the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. and Washington’s subsequent declaration of a “global war on terror” as a pretext to intensify its targeting of Uyghur Muslims.
Changing Xinjiang’s Population Chinese leaders sought to increase Xinjiang’s ethnic Han population through settlement programs, and experts estimate that tens of thousands of Uyghurs have been transferred out of the region for work.
International Condemnation The U.N. and the U.S. have condemned China’s abuses, including the use of internment camps and forced sterilization. The State Department called it genocide.
China’s Crackdown Critics of the government’s treatment of Uyghurs as well as their family members have disappeared or been detained, even abroad.
In recent days, word of Mr. Guan’s possible deportation set off a furor in the United States. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal decried his possible deportation, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic congressman from Illinois who is a ranking member of a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, called for Mr. Guan’s release.
At Monday’s hearing, Judge Charles Ouslander scheduled another hearing on Mr. Guan’s removal for Jan. 12, citing among several reasons the heightened interest in the case.
Mr. Chen said that he would file a motion on Mr. Guan’s behalf to allow him to stay in the United States and continue with his asylum application.
Mr. Guan was detained in August by immigration officials who had been carrying out an action against his landlord in upstate New York, according to Mr. Chen. A source familiar with the case said that Mr. Guan had been arrested during a raid led by the F.B.I. and Homeland Security Investigations, but that the man had no apparent criminal history.
On Monday, Mr. Guan joined the hearing through a video link wearing an orange jumpsuit from a jail in Binghamton, N.Y., where he is currently being held.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The detention centers in Xinjiang were part of a draconian campaign under the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to indoctrinate Uyghurs and root out what the Communist Party said were dangerous ideas fueling resistance and extremist violence. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and members of other mostly Muslim ethnic groups — some estimates said a million or more — were rounded up and held in re-education centers, detention sites or prisons.
During Mr. Trump’s first presidency, the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs emerged as a major source of tension between the two sides. In 2021, on the last full day of Mr. Trump’s first term, the State Department officially declared the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang a “genocide.”
And Marco Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida and now the secretary of state, was among the most outspoken members of Congress on the issue.
Recent reports show that the Chinese government has sent Uyghurs out of Xinjiang to other parts of the country on government work programs that many experts believe are forcible in nature.
The Chinese government, for its part, has rejected any accusations of genocide or human rights violations and has defended its efforts in Xinjiang as necessary to fight against terrorism. Over the years, the government has systematically quashed efforts to question that narrative. It has asserted control through the use of mass surveillance and censorship, heavy policing of the local population as well as intimidation and threats to silence Uyghurs and other critics abroad.
The government has also severely restricted independent media access to the region, which is what made Mr. Guan’s footage — which provided a rare, close-up look at the detention camps detailing their high walls, guard towers and barbed wire — so revelatory.
“It had a big impact for people to see that, wow, this is real stuff happening to people,” said Tahir Imin, a Uyghur activist based in Washington.
Mr. Guan visited Xinjiang as a tourist in 2019, when the detention campaign was at its height, and was shocked by the heavy-handed security he encountered, he told Human Rights in China, a group that is seeking his release from detention.
Later, evading China’s internet censorship firewall, he read a report from Buzzfeed News about the re-education centers in Xinjiang and decided to try to document them. He figured out the likely locations of centers from the Buzzfeed report and drove from site to site across several days in 2020, using a video camera to film the centers from a distance. Mr. Guan realized that, if he released the video, he would almost surely be arrested if he stayed in China, he told Human Rights in China.
In 2021, after China began relaxing its pandemic-related restrictions on travel, Mr. Guan traveled to Hong Kong and then flew to Ecuador, which at the time allowed visa-free entry for Chinese passport holders. From there he flew to the Bahamas and then bought a small boat to make a grueling journey to Florida. Mr. Guan then released the video footage taken in Xinjiang on the internet, attracting widespread attention.
“Those unwilling to be enslaved are also unwilling to see others enslaved,” he said in the voice-over for his 19-minute documentary.
Mr. Guan’s mother, Luo Yun, who has lived in Taiwan for nearly 20 years, said that their family members in China, including Mr. Guan’s father and Ms. Luo’s four sisters, had all been questioned by police officers. The officers asked them about their contacts with Mr. Guan and their knowledge of his activities, Ms. Luo said in an interview.
“He’s definitely on the Chinese Communist Party’s blacklist,” Ms. Luo said of her son. “Even our family members who had no relationship with him after he became an adult have been investigated.”
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
Amy Qin writes about Asian American communities for The Times.
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