The most recent information on the status of citizen journalist Guan Heng, who bravely provided documentary evidence of the PRC’s brutal mass detention of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China before fleeing to the United States, comes to us from Reuters and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement came for Guan’s roommates in August 2025, they also scooped up Guan because he had entered the United States irregularly. He has applied for asylum. There was no reason for ICE to detain him, certainly not longer than however long it would take—not long—to confirm his background.
CPJ says in a recent update that “Following the DHS’s decision to drop its proposal to deport the journalist to Uganda [confirmed by Reuters], CPJ calls on the agency to ensure that the journalist can stay in the U.S. while continuing the process of applying for asylum” (December 18, 2025):
The Trump administration’s plan to deport a Chinese citizen journalist—who fled his country in fear of retaliation for his coverage of Uyghur detention camps—is a critical blow to America’s reputation as a haven for asylum-seekers that will cast the country as a conduit of transnational repression, the Committee to Protect Journalists said on Wednesday….
Another hearing for Guan’s removal has been scheduled for January 12, according to news reports, after the Trump administration argued during a Monday hearing that Guan could be sent to Uganda as part of a deportation policy allowing for detainees to be sent to third party countries. According to [Guan’s lawyer Chen Chuangchuan], deportation to Uganda would almost certainly lead to Guan’s repatriation to China, due to the countries’ strong military and intelligence ties, where he would almost certainly face retribution for his work….
Guan documented social issues in China on his YouTube channel, including heavy metal pollution and the alleged targeting of Uyghurs, a predominately Muslim group in China’s Xinjiang province. In 2021, Guan identified the likely locations of detention facilities for Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province based on a news report and filmed the centers, providing a rare glimpse of the facilities. The 20-minute video was filmed in 2020 and was released in October 2021, after Guan arrived in the United States.
Among those who have weighed in: World Uyghur Congress, The Wall Street Journal, Reason (at Reason and The Hill), protesters in the U.S., Vision Times.
Question: why is whether Guan will be deported from the United States still a question? If U.S. officials are now dropping the idea of sending Guan to Uganda, it must be because they too have some idea of the probabilities in light of his track record of being a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party.
Everybody on the ICE and U.S. administration side of things must know by now who Guan is, i.e., not just a gate crasher and certainly not a spy for the CCP. Leave him alone already.
Somebody who knows somebody must talk to somebody who knows somebody else who can talk to the president of the United States about this and put an end to Guan’s nightmare. Or maybe Secretary of State Marco Rubio can step in.
