Heng Guan is a Chinese citizen from central China. In 2020, he read about mass detentions and other human rights abuses against Uyghurs in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, and he decided to go see for himself. The video he put on social media in 2021 provided valuable confirmation of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang, which the US government said amounted to genocide that very same year. Now, Guan is in ICE detention, facing the possibility of being deported to Uganda. Human rights advocates say this would put Guan in grave danger and that his case for asylum is a textbook example of why the US created this pathway to citizenship in the first place. The World’s Matthew Bell reports.
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