First of all, Guan Heng is an international human rights hero. He chose to take serious personal risks to document human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in China’s western Xinjiang province – ultimately dubbed genocide by the United States – simply because he felt the need to shine a light on the injustice.
For a decade, Muslim Uyghurs have been imprisoned in massive camps and compounds (an estimated 1 to 3 million people have been detained), “re-educated,” divided, dispersed, and repressed under direct orders from Beijing. Knowledge of human rights abuses is also tightly suppressed through the Chinese government’s full range of intimidation campaigns, from mass surveillance and censorship to police brutality. Heng Guan, a 38-year-old native of Henan, China, wanted to get to the bottom of the government’s internet firewall, so he traveled across China with a camera and secretly captured footage of the concentration camps that was instrumental in the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Uyghur genocide. Guan did all this while knowing that if he posted the video, the outcome would likely be that he would never see his family again, as he would be forced to flee China to escape government persecution. So he embarked on a globetrotting trip to the United States to share his footage. Now, just over four years later, despite the progress of his asylum case, the United States and ICE are preparing to deport Hengguan to Uganda, where he will almost certainly be returned to China. and should That Guan’s own mother was quoted as saying: “If he was deported, he would really be dead.”
Guan Heng was arrested by ICE in an August raid and he was not even a target, perfectly embodying the clumsiness and cruelty of the U.S. deportation agency. Immigration officials turned to his roommate, but Guan was also detained despite showing a work permit, a New York state driver’s license and documents related to his asylum case. None of this matters to ICE: they only care that Customs entered the country by sea, and they cannot produce an I-94 entry record form. He has been in custody since then, eventually being lodged at the Broome County Jail in Binghamton, New York. After an immigration hearing in New York on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly filed a motion for early approval to terminate Guan’s asylum application and then deport him to Uganda…a powerful strategic ally of China. In effect, this would amount to sending Mr. Guan directly back to the Chinese authorities for immediate execution.
Heng Guan’s incredible escape
If you don’t understand the commitment it took for Hengguan to travel to the United States and release his self-written 20-minute documentary (which is still available on YouTube), you can’t truly understand his selfless actions in gathering and sharing evidence of the Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang. This man had to travel the world and ended up spending all his life savings, only to stumble from the beach to the shores of the United States, not knowing what he would find there.
In order to leave China, Mr. Guan first went to Hong Kong in July 2021. From there, he flew to Ecuador, one of the few countries at the time that offered visa-free entry to Chinese tourists. He ended up staying there for two months to complete the two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine required for further international travel. From Ecuador he traveled to the Bahamas, another country that does not require a visa to enter. It’s as close as he can get to the U.S. coast, about 85 straight-line miles from the southern tip of Florida. He needed a boat to cover the distance and originally planned to order a cheap boat from China, but his expiring temporary visa forced Guan to spend almost all his remaining savings locally on a small inflatable boat and an outboard motor. The man had never sailed in his life, but that didn’t stop him from sailing west without any idea of what he was doing. He drifted at sea for almost a whole day, wondering whether he would be arrested as soon as he reached the shores of a country he had never set foot on.
The next morning, Evergrande made landfall off the coast of Florida. He panicked at the thought of being arrested and left almost everything behind except a backpack containing his tech equipment. As he hid in the bushes and watched a Coast Guard cutter sail by, he knew that, at the very least, his video had been shared around the world. Not willing to leave anything to chance, and knowing something might happen during his desperate final leg of his journey, he scheduled the release in advance.
“I don’t know if I will reach the United States safely and I can’t wait to release it,” he told the NGO Human Rights in China.
In the video, he offers his own rationale for why someone would risk so much and turn their life upside down just to post the video: “Those who don’t want to be enslaved don’t want to see others being enslaved.”
Deportation or death penalty
Hengguan will fall victim to the Donald Trump administration’s use of so-called “third country deportations,” in which foreigners in the United States are sent not to their country of origin but to seemingly random receiving locations. For example, when the Trump administration sent five immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, Yemen, Jamaica and Cuba to the southern African nation of Swaziland earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security defended the decision because “the flight took people so savage that their home countries refused to take them back” because they had been convicted of crimes including murder, assault and robbery. Hengguan, on the other hand, was charged with illegal entry, and Department of Homeland Security lawyers at Monday’s hearing cited an agreement that protects asylum seekers who might be punished by their home countries rather than being deported to so-called “safe third countries” in the United States, where they could theoretically apply for asylum again. The only problem: Uganda’s close ties with China mean they may simply hand him over to Beijing. This is how Guan Heng’s lawyer Chen Chuangchuang argued. new york times “For a highly sensitive person like Mr. Guan, there is a high probability that Uganda will deport him back to China.”
That effectively made HCW’s deportation a case of the Department of Homeland Security serving China, even though the U.S. agreed at the end of Trump’s first administration that HCW had called China’s treatment of the Uyghurs a genocide. Many in the Trump administration’s top ranks have also been critical of Beijing’s human rights abuses here, particularly Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has been a strong critic of China on the issue. But where are the defenders of Hengguan in the U.S. government? Why didn’t Rubio step in? He began by providing us with first-hand video footage of indoctrination and re-education camps. Buzzfeed later won a Pulitzer Prize for its parallel reporting on the Uyghur genocide using findings from the CCTV footage, which itself was based on some of Buzzfeed’s original reporting. The Buzzfeed team issued the following statement to Human Rights in China, imploring Mr. Guan not to be deported:
The BuzzFeed team wrote in the letter: “Mr. Guan took great personal risks to provide important corroborating evidence for our investigation. His courage was extraordinary… He had no other reasonable reason to approach these detention facilities because they are often located in remote areas… If discovered, the danger he faced would be greatly increased.” They specifically pointed out that the evidence provided by Guan Heng confirmed the existence of Xindabancheng Prison and directly exposed the Chinese government’s lies about “closing the re-education camps.” The joint letter concluded: “We believe that Mr. Guan will be in great danger if he is deported back to China. Therefore, we call on the United States to grant Mr. Guan asylum and stop the threat of detention and deportation against him.”
The rest of Hangguan’s family in China were also subsequently interrogated and harassed, hinting at what might have happened to him if he were deported by the US/Uganda government. His mother, Luo Yun, has lived in Taiwan outside of China’s direct control for nearly 20 years, but she said when she was finally able to contact him after his arrest by ICE, he was in an emotional state of “extreme panic and collapse” as he faced the threat of deportation and retaliation for his heroic actions and epic journey into 2021.
“I’m heartbroken,” she said in a statement The Guardian. “I cry not only for my child, but also for the situation our family faces. I just hope my child can recover. He is still young and has a long road ahead of him.”