A man who fled to the United States after putting his freedom at risk by documenting China’s repression of Uyghurs and other targeted minorities in Xinjiang has been granted his request for asylum—originally submitted in 2021. Some weeks ago the U.S. government gave up the idea, arrived at how who knows, of deporting Guan Heng to Uganda, which would have promptly turned him over to the People’s Republic of China.
Dropping that terrible idea was a good sign. But until now Guan’s fate has still been uncertain (Saudi Gazette, January 29, 2026)
Guan Heng [shown above], 38, applied for asylum after arriving in the US illegally in 2021. He has been in custody since being swept up in an immigration enforcement operation in August [2025] as part of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration.
The Department of Homeland Security initially sought to deport Guan to Uganda, but dropped the plan in December after his plight raised public concerns and attracted attention on Capitol Hill.
In 2020, Guan Heng secretly filmed detention facilitates in the north-western Chinese region, where human rights groups say more than one million ethnic Uyghurs have been detained against their will.
When asked during Wednesday’s hearing in Napanoch, New York, if his plan in filming the detention facilities and releasing the video a few days before his arrival in the US was to give himself grounds for an asylum claim, Guan said it was not.
“I sympathized with the Uyghurs who were persecuted,” he replied, via video link from the US correctional facility where he was being held.
That Guan Heng would get a fair shake from the immigration judge considering his case was not a foregone conclusion. Fortunately, though, “The judge on Wednesday said Guan was right to fear retaliation from the Chinese state if sent back, noting that his family had already been questioned, and said he had established his legal eligibility for asylum.”
Guan is not quite home free, since the Department of Homeland Security has 30 days in which to appeal the decision if it chooses to do so. But so many prominent politicians and others have spoken in his favor, and the case for asylum is so clear-cut, that the chances of such an action seem vanishingly small. If this guy doesn’t deserve asylum, who does?
