Guan Heng Exposed China's Uyghur Camps. ICE Wants To Deport Him.

Guan Heng is a former resident of China who did something amazing: He defied the country’s authoritarian government and documented the abuses of Uyghur Muslims.

The 37-year-old citizen-journalist entered Xinjiang after downloading the satellite coordinates of alleged Uyghur detention facilities. He took pictures of the camps—camps that the Chinese Communist Party has claimed do not exist. He shared these images with BuzzFeed News, which then published an eye-opening series of articles about the internment of ethnic and religious minorities in China.

It was incredibly brave of Guan Heng to do this. Documenting the atrocities of tyrants is important work—and extremely dangerous. Heng knew that if the Chinese authorities got a chance, they would arrest him, question him, and possibly torture and even kill him. And so he fled China in 2021, traveling to Ecuador and  eventually by boat to the U.S. He applied for asylum and obtained a work permit. He has been living quietly in New York ever since, working as an Uber driver and food deliverer.

A few months ago, in August, ICE detained him after he admitted he had initially entered the country illegally. Immigration authorities would now like to deport him, either to Uganda—where he would likely be taken back to China—or to China directly.

That would be a travesty. The feds should certainly not deport Guan Heng, no matter how he came to this country. On the contrary, he should be commended and welcomed. As The Wall Street Journal says:”It’s hard to imagine a stronger case for asylum.” There is no good reason for ICE to work as a communist government’s enforcer.

It’s true that many Americans want the federal government to vet asylum claims with greater care. But Guan Heng should easily pass any such test. If anything, the government should incentivize anti-communist whistleblowers and citizen-journalists to cooperate with the U.S. We want Chinese scientists, for instance, who have information about the possible lab origins of COVID-19 to document and disseminate any such evidence, and to seek refuge as far from Beijing’s reach as possible.

Democrats on the U.S. House of Representative’s Foreign Affairs committee appear to be taking up Guan Heng’s case. That’s good, but there is absolutely no reason for this to become a partisan issue. Any Republicans who care about China’s authoritarian ways should concede that this is obviously a case where other considerations should overrule the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.

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