Chinese national Guan Heng, 38, was granted asylum in the United States at a hearing on Wednesday in Napanoch, New York.
Guan was arrested in August during a deportation sweep, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was at one point planning to deport him to Uganda, but his fears of facing retribution for exposing Chinese human rights abuses against the Uyghurs drew national attention to his case.
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Guan took photos in 2020 of China’s abusive practices at the massive concentration camps it constructed in the Uyghur homeland, East Turkistan, which China refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) or Xinjiang province. He conducted his research by driving alone to Xinjiang and hunting for camps hidden in the wilderness.
Guan said he was inspired to make the trip by American news coverage of the Uyghurs’ plight, which he viewed in defiance of Chinese censorship laws during the coronavirus lockdowns. He had visited scenic Xinjiang a year earlier as a motorcycle tourist and found the heavy security presence puzzling.
After taking his photos, Guan fled China, made his way to South America, and then traveled from the Bahamas to Florida in a small boat in 2021. He published his photos of the Uyghur detention camps soon after arriving in the U.S. and applied for asylum, but his application was still pending – making him an illegal resident of the United States – when he was swept up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in August 2025.
The raid actually targeted Guan’s roommates, who had been reported to the authorities during a financial dispute over a business they were running. The agents were executing a search warrant when they encountered Guan, who happened to be at the home.
When the ICE agents asked Guan how he entered the United States, he replied, “I came by sailing a boat over the ocean.” He answered “no” when they asked if he had the necessary entry paperwork, so they took him into custody. He has been detained at the Broome County Jail in New York for most of the time since then – one of about 3 million people waiting for their asylum applications to be processed.
Guan’s case attracted a great deal of attention, as journalist groups, human rights activists, and politicians argued his claim for asylum was strong, and should have been swiftly granted due to his genuine fears of persecution back in China.
A proposal to deport him to the third country of Uganda, which agreed to accept U.S. deportees, satisfied none of his advocates, in part because China has considerable economic and political influence in Uganda. DHS dropped the Uganda deportation idea in a letter to Guan’s lawyers on December 19, 2025, about four months after he was arrested in the ICE raid.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in December calling for immediate release and asylum approval for Guan.
“The United States has a moral responsibility to stand up for victims of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as well as the brave individuals who take immense personal risks to expose these abuses to the world. We also have a legal responsibility to protect those who seek refuge in our country from persecution by authoritarian governments, such as the People’s Republic of China,” Krishnamoorthi contended.
“He has a pending asylum application, and the circumstances of his departure from the PRC are a textbook example of why asylum exists,” he said, citing assertions by Guan’s family that he would be arrested, and probably tortured and killed, if he fell into Beijing’s clutches.
The Trump State Department sent a letter to the immigration judge in Guan’s case, Judge Charles M. Ouslander, that seemingly bolstered his claim to fear persecution by China and lauded his role in exposing human rights abuses at the Uyghur camps.
President Donald Trump addresses members of the media in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Tuesday, January 20, 2026. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Ouslander cited this letter when ruling in Guan’s favor on Wednesday, describing the applicant’s testimony as “credible and worthy of belief.” The judge noted that the State Department has classified China’s treatment of the Uyghurs as “genocide,” a crime against humanity.
A key question raised at the hearing was if Guan took his photos of the Uyghur camps as part of a premeditated plan to secure asylum in the United States. He told the court that he took the photos because he “sympathized with the Uyghurs who were persecuted,” and fled China because he knew it was the only way to publish his footage.
Guan said that his family back in China has been harassed by the authorities, and Judge Ouslander agreed this supported his claim that he would face persecution if he was not granted asylum.
Guan was not immediately released after the judge’s ruling, however, because DHS said it might file an appeal and has 30 days to do so. The judge urged DHS to make its decision quickly, given how long Guan has already been detained.
Guan’s advocates present him as a clear example of someone who deserves a speedy grant of asylum and paint the system’s treatment of him as outrageous and unreasonable. In his closing argument to the court, Guan’s lawyer Chen Chuangchuang described him as a “textbook example of why asylum should exist,” and said the U.S. government has a “moral and legal responsibility” to grant his request.
Chen said Guan’s actions in Xinjiang, “driven by his extraordinary moral courage,” were clearly “worthy of U.S. government protection.”
On the other hand, Chen’s plight also illustrates how that system has been overloaded to the breaking point by far weaker claims to asylum. He unquestionably did immigrate to the United States illegally, instead of waiting for his claim to be approved and, by his own admission, there are rules he did not follow.
The argument in Chen’s favor boils down to asserting that his case is so exemplary that he should have been granted a waiver from many of those rules and procedures, but massive bureaucracies with a titanic overload of cases to process do not usually respond quickly to such pleas for special treatment.
It should also be noted that Chen’s application for asylum was filed under the Biden administration in 2021 and that administration was not moved to grant him instant approval or expedited processing. He got on the Trump administration’s radar when ICE arrested him in August, and his asylum claim will apparently be granted after five or six months in detention, depending on if DHS files an appeal.
Chen himself seemed like a good sport about the whole thing in a telephone interview with the left-wing New York Times (NYT) on Wednesday, his major complaint being that the ICE agents who took him into custody should have paid more attention to his valid work permit.
“Their focus was mainly on how I arrived in the United States, so I told them the truth,” he said. He also found the DHS idea of deporting him to Uganda “unreasonable.”
“Despite the monthslong ordeal, Mr. Guan said that he did not regret his decision to flee to the United States. He said he understood why, after years of rising illegal migration, Mr. Trump was taking such a hard line. National immigration policies often fluctuated, he reasoned, and he happened to come at a time of tightening,” the NYT reported.
“I’m just a little unlucky, that’s all,” Guan concluded.
The Uyghurs, alas, are still being persecuted by China despite Guan’s efforts, and the Chinese government still insists it did nothing wrong.
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