WASHINGTON — Guan Heng, a Chinese asylum seeker who secretly filmed detention facilities in China’s Xinjiang region, is in U.S. custody and is asking a judge to block his removal. A judge on Monday is set to consider his appeal to remain in the United States after he was swept up in an immigration enforcement operation in August, the Associated Press reported.
In a recent call from the Broome County Correctional Facility in New York, the AP said Guan, 38, told the outlet he fears what would happen if he were sent back. “I would be prosecuted, I would be jailed, I would be tortured. All of that could happen,” Guan said, according to the AP.
The AP reported that the Department of Homeland Security initially sought to deport him to Uganda, but dropped that plan in December after public attention raised concerns and attracted notice on Capitol Hill. His future, however, remained unclear as his appeal proceeded.
The AP also reported that Guan said the attention surrounding his case has given him hope. During his early months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, he said “there was no help from the outside world,” and he described fellow detainees’ stories and reports about the Trump administration’s anti-immigration campaign as leaving him “extremely pessimistic.”
The AP said ICE agents encountered Guan during an operation targeting his housemates in the small town where he had been living outside of Albany. A DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, told the AP in a written response that ICE encountered Guan while assisting the FBI in executing a criminal search warrant and added, “All of his claims will be heard before an immigration judge.”
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a member of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to release Guan and approve his asylum request. In a statement to the AP, Krishnamoorthi called for “careful adherence to due process and America’s long-standing commitment to protecting human rights whistleblowers.”
The case has also drawn attention from immigration advocates as part of broader concerns about asylum processing. Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told the AP that it is “worrying to see that an institution like asylum is being so eroded,” and she said she is “very worried” about asylum seekers being sent back to “extremely dangerous conditions.”
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, said the Trump administration is making a “concerted effort” to remove asylum seekers. She told the AP that rather than letting people remain while cases are pending, immigration authorities are closing out cases and issuing removal orders for rapid deportation.
Federal data cited by the AP from Mobile Pathways, a California nonprofit that helps immigrants navigate the U.S. legal system, showed 170,626 asylum seekers were ordered deported in 2025. The AP said the data also showed 31% of asylum applications were abandoned in 2025, compared with 11% between 2010 and 2024, and that Bartlomiej Skorupa, the group’s chief operating officer, said cases are typically marked “abandoned” when an applicant misses an appointment.
Guan left China in 2020 after secretly filming Xinjiang detention facilities, according to the AP. The report said he sought asylum after fleeing more than four years ago to publish the footage and that, by the time he arrived in Florida in October 2021, he had released most of his video on YouTube. The AP said he first went to Hong Kong, then traveled through Ecuador and the Bahamas before sailing to Florida.
The Chinese government has denied allegations about abuses in Xinjiang, the AP reported, and says it runs vocational training programs while rooting out radical thoughts. Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy, told the AP he was unfamiliar with the specifics of Guan’s case but defended China’s Xinjiang policy, saying, “The Chinese government has consistently worked to promote and protect human rights, and the development and progress in Xinjiang are plain to see and should not be smeared.”
In the AP account, Guan said he believes he understands why the Trump administration has taken a radical approach to immigration enforcement. He told the AP that “No matter what it is, any issue gets both support and opposition,” and that he has also seen people protest what he described as the government’s too-aggressive behavior. If released, he said, he would want to “do meaningful things” and help others, according to the AP.