Chinese national Guan Heng, who filmed Xinjiang facilities, granted US asylum

An immigration judge on Wednesday granted asylum to a Chinese national who he said had a “well-founded fear” of persecution if sent back to China after exposing human rights abuses there.

Guan Heng, 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 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.

Guan in 2020 secretly filmed detention facilities in Xinjiang, adding to a body of evidence of what activists say are widespread rights abuses in the Chinese region, where as many as 1 million members of ethnic minorities, especially the Uygurs, have been locked up.

During Wednesday’s hearing in Napanoch, New York, Guan was asked if his intention in filming the detention facilities and then releasing the video a few days before arriving in the US was to give him grounds to apply for asylum. He said that was not his goal.

“I sympathised with the Uygurs who were persecuted,” Guan, speaking by video link from the Broome County Correctional Facility, told the court through a translator.