Xinjiang whistleblower faces deportation to China — lawyer

Heng Guan, a Chinese national who documented a network of detention facilities in China's northwestern Xinjiang province, has spent months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody as the Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempted to deport him.

Guan's second court hearing is set for Monday after a DHS prosecutor asked a court in December to deport him to Uganda under a third-country migrant deal.

That request was later withdrawn amid concerns raised in Washington, D.C., but ICE continued to push for Guan's deportation to China, according to his attorney, Chuangchuang Chen.

"I would jump off the plane if deported," Guan told DW in an exclusive interview from an ICE detention facility. "I would rather die than face imprisonment in China."

The 38-year-old amateur photographer from China's central Henan province entered the United States in 2021 by boat from Freeport in The Bahamas after producing a 20-minute vlog from Xinjiang, accusing the Chinese government of mass incarceration of Muslim Uyghurs.

Guan said he would face imprisonment if returned to China.

"I'm not disappointed with the US," he said, yet he believed remaining in America was his only protection against any retribution from Beijing.

Chen told DW that he did not expect the judge to issue a ruling on Monday "unless the authority dropped the case."

Before the ICE raid on his apartment building in August 2025, Guan had been working as an Uber and truck driver in New York state.

"I thought I was legal before I was arrested. At least I was legal while waiting for my asylum," Guan said.

Guan was authorized to work while his asylum case was pending. Asylum interviews typically take years to schedule, on top of other legal procedures.

"I didn't expect to be arrested," Guan said. "It's a change under this administration."

Guan said he presented his Employment Authorization Document and driver's license to ICE agents, but he was still handcuffed and moved through several detention facilities.

He said that following his arrest, ICE served him with an administrative warrant stating that he was inadmissible to the US.

Guan has been detained ever since. An immigration judge denied his request for bail in December.

The case raised alarm in Washington about the high risk of persecution if Guan is deported.

Public support for Guan, including in Congress, escalated after Human Rights in China, an NGO, publicized his case.

Chen said the political support is helpful, but Guan's fate ultimately lies with the immigration judge.

DW requested a comment from ICE but received no response.

Guan was a factory and oil field laborer born and raised in Central China. He developed a hobby in photography in college and started producing travel vlogs in 2018.

A motorcycle ride through Xinjiang in 2019 shifted his focus.

"I didn't know about the ... camps against Uyghurs then, but I sensed an abnormal social climate, seeing the tight regulations and control there," Guan said.

After reading a 2020 investigation by US news outlet BuzzFeed News that used satellite images to geolocate the mass internment of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, Guan decided to revisit there.

He filmed a 20-minute video of several detention sites by following the American outlet's information.

"When I realized that foreign journalists are not allowed to freely enter places like Xinjiang, I felt a very strong sense of civic responsibility and wanted to go there to document and bear witness," he said.

To release the footage, Guan concluded he had to leave China.

The US was not his first stop. Guan flew to Ecuador and then The Bahamas, countries that allowed Chinese passport holders to enter without visas.

"Because not all countries can guarantee freedom of expression or offer protection to dissidents, and some even have precedents for deporting dissidents back to China, I weighed my options," he said.

"In the end, out of sheer necessity, with no other choices and nowhere else to go, I had no option but to find an unconventional way to come to the United States."

He bought a small inflatable boat and an outboard motor in the Bahamas before setting off for Florida, according to the NGO Human Rights in China.

After stepping onto US soil in 2021, Guan released his Xinjiang footage online.

The video quickly drew the attention of researchers specializing in China's alleged human rights abuses.

Alison Killing, one of the authors of the BuzzFeed News investigation, told DW in 2021 that Guan's on-the-ground video helped confirm whether many of the facilities were prisons or detention centers.

The Xinjiang video also burned Guan's bridges back home.

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Yun Luo, Guan's mother, moved to Taiwan years ago and recently traveled to the US for her son's hearings. She told DW that relatives in China had been questioned by authorities and have since cut off contact with Guan.

"It was heartbreaking. We used to catch up on the phone every week," Luo said. "Now they don't reply to my messages."  Guan's personal information was also leaked online after he uploaded the Xinjiang video to YouTube.

Luo said that they "won't stop going after him after the video was released."

"He came to the US at the wrong time," Luo said. "This wouldn't be the case if he had come decades earlier."

Even so, Guan said he cherished the freedom he has experienced in the United States, even if he had not fully "exercised" it. "It's not something I had in China," he said.

"It's just that, right now, we happen to be going through the president's radical anti-immigration policies."

"I'm not disappointed," Guan told DW. "I see it as a natural fluctuation within the way the political system works. It's just that I happened to experience it at an unlucky time."