Guan Heng is scheduled to appear in court on December 15 to learn whether he will be allowed to remain in the United States. That’s the date of his asylum hearing.
In August 2025, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when agents of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement came to arrest his roommates. Human Rights in China reports the conversation that took place between Guan and an agent (December 12, 2025).
Agent: “How did you enter the country?”
Guan Heng: “I came by sailing a boat over the ocean.”
Agent: “Do you have an I-94 form [entry record]?”
Guan Heng: “No.”
Guan Heng was first taken to an ICE office, then transferred to a county jail near Albany, where he was held for a day, then transferred to an immigration detention center in Buffalo, where he was held for nearly a week. Finally, he was sent to his current place of detention—Broome County Jail.
“They don’t care whether I have a work permit or what the status of my asylum case is,” Guan Heng said in a phone interview with Human Rights in China in October 2025, his voice filled with confusion and frustration. “They only care about how I entered the country. They just said that I didn’t enter through normal customs, and that act itself is a crime.”
So Guan did not go through normal channels to enter the United States. But if anybody should be cut some slack and granted asylum, it’s this guy, who most likely would be imprisoned by the Chinese government if forced to return to China. “If he gets sent back, he’s dead,” is how his mother puts it.
In October 2020, Guan Heng, a young man from Henan, China, drove alone into Xinjiang, using a telephoto lens to document the concentration camp facilities hidden in the wilderness, towns, and military camps. To make these images public, he embarked on a thrilling escape: he made his way through South America and finally sailed alone in a small boat for 23 hours from the Bahamas, successfully landing in Florida. After arriving in the United States in 2021, he released the videos as planned. This footage became crucial evidence for the international community (including BuzzFeed News’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team) to confirm what China was doing in Xinjiang.
The Chinese government is “very good at concealing things they don’t want people to see,” Guan Heng says. The BuzzFeed reports “strongly piqued my interest, especially since I had been to Xinjiang but knew nothing about this. I really wanted to go back and see for myself what was going on.”
After making extensive preparations, he managed during his own investigation to more than confirm the BuzzFeed findings. (See HRIC’s report for details of his trips in Xinjiang.)
A couple of days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Rep. James P. McGovern (D., Mass.) sent a letter Friday to the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph B. Edlow, supporting an application for giving Guan political asylum in the U.S.”
Guan told the story he wanted to tell. Now the question is whether his life will be destroyed because he was brave and determined enough to tell it.
Also see:
guanguan: “In Search of Concentration Camps in XinJiang – A Documentary on Urban/Rural China” (Chinese-language video with English subtitles)
BuzzFeed News: “Built to Last” (August 27, 2020)
“China has secretly built scores of massive new prison and internment camps in the past three years, dramatically escalating its campaign against Muslim minorities even as it publicly claimed the detainees had all been set free.”
