Chinese dissident Heng Guan granted asylum by U.S. judge

On Jan. 28, 2026, a federal immigration judge granted asylum to Heng Guan, a 38-year-old Chinese national who secretly documented the Chinese government’s detention and surveillance of Uyghurs; he will not be released immediately, as Homeland Security said it was reserving the right to appeal.

Judge Charles M. Ouslander said Mr. Guan’s testimony was “credible and worthy of belief,” citing factors that included the State Department’s prior designation of China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as a “genocide” and a letter from the State Department describing Mr. Guan’s role in documenting abuses.

Mr. Guan filmed detention centers in Xinjiang in 2020 that showed high walls, guard towers and barbed wire and later released the footage while sailing from the Bahamas to Florida. Supporters and human rights advocates said the videos provided rare visual evidence of the scale of the clampdown and challenged Beijing’s claims that people lived at the centers voluntarily.

Mr. Guan was detained in upstate New York last August after being caught up in an immigration enforcement effort targeting his housemates. The Department of Homeland Security at one point sought to deport him to Uganda and then dropped that request in late December; he has remained in immigration detention.

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