Hundreds of Hongkongers currently living in the United States are hoping for an extension of Deferred Enforced Departure for Certain Hong Kong Citizens from the Biden administration.
According to the White House’s August 2021 memo on this status, “The United States is committed to a foreign policy that unites our democratic values with our foreign policy goals, which is centered on the defense of democracy and the promotion of human rights around the world. Offering safe haven for Hong Kong residents who have been deprived of their guaranteed freedoms in Hong Kong furthers United States interests in the region.”
The current postponement expires in February 2025. The Hongkongers would like it to be extended before Trump takes over because they are unsure what the new administration’s policy toward them will be. Politico says that they “fear that Trump’s hostility to immigrants will prompt him to refuse to renew that protection…” (“Hong Kongers in U.S. worry Trump will deport them,” November 14, 2024).
Biden extended that protection—which applies to 3,860 Hong Kong citizens and allows them to work but provides no path to either asylum or citizenship—in 2023, but it expires in February….
Many of the Hong Kongers who benefit from [Deferred Enforced Departure] fear that their participation in 2019-2020 pro-democracy protests there make them vulnerable to prosecution under Hong Kong’s national security law. That law conflates peaceful protests with “treason” and has landed more than 1,900 Hong Kongers behind bars in recent years. Those prisoners are also at risk of “torture and mistreatment,” lawmakers including Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), ranking member of the House Select Committee on China said in a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken released Wednesday.
I didn’t know that Trump is hostile to “immigrants” as such. Is this the way the Hongkongers are putting it or just the way Politico is putting it?
In any case, the Biden administration should of course renew the status, if only so that the Hongkongers living here needn’t worry about the possibility of a lapse in their status under the new Trump administration and will have time to ask that new administration for a more permanent resolution.
The Hong Kong Democracy Council reports that as of November 13, 2024, the number of political prisoners in Hong Kong is 1,910, up from 1,014 in May 2022. There had been only a few when the mass protests of 2019 began.
In 2022, the Council stated that in less than three years, “the city has gone from having only a handful of political prisoners to recently crossing the 1,000 mark, rivaling Belarus, Burma and Cuba, other authoritarian societies. The aggregated length of sentences exceeds 772 years, while more than half of the political prisoners are under 25 year-old. Meanwhile, remand has risen as a means of keeping political opponents in long-term pre-trial detention—the average time on remand is 16.6 months.”
HKDC’s 2022 report is “supplemented by the Hong Kong Political Prisoners Database, maintained and regularly updated by HKDC to facilitate human rights monitoring and advocacy.” The dataset, an Excel sheet, can be downloaded.
