When Guan Heng read 2020 BuzzFeed News Report about China, which is building huge camps to incarcerate tens of thousands of people of the Uyghur ethnic minorities, he decided to go and see for himself.

Guan, a YouTuber then living in Henan, China, drove himself to the in Xinjiang province October 2021 and used a telephoto lens to document the hidden camps, which human rights groups say exist as much as onand a million Uighurs.

The video he took set off a wild series of eventssaw him flee China, sail to the US via Ecuador and the Bahamas, then seek asylum only to be swept up in an Immigration Customs and Border Protection (ICE) raid last summer.

Now, five years after his saga began, a US judge has granted Guan’s asylum claim.

“He … testified strongly, convincingly to prove what happened to him – why he left China, why he did these things,” said Guan’s lawyer Chen Chuangchuang As it happens host Nil Köksal.

‘He had to do something’

Before all this happened, Guan, an avid traveler, spent time in Xinjiang in 2019, where he noticed “some very strange things,” his lawyer said.

“He personally witnessed how the situation in Xinjiang is very different from the interior of China, how many people and police or military forces were on the streets,” Chen said.

Xinjiang is home to the majority of China’s Uyghur population, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority who, according to human rights groups, they are subjected to extensive surveillance, detention and forced labor.

At the time, his lawyer says, Guan lacked the context to explain what he saw.

Then he came across, in the depths of COVD-19 quarantine Built to last, a Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News investigative series. Using satellite imagery and interviews with former Uyghur detainees, it details China’s efforts to expand mass internment camps in Xinjiang.

“He thought he had to do something,” Chen said. “So he made a decision: I want to go back to Xinjiang to make a video about the camps.”

His footage appears to corroborate the BuzzFeed report, showing large facilities under construction in Xinjiang’s wilderness, cities and military bases.

He feared reprisals from Chinese authorities if he released what he recorded, so he took his footage, flew to Ecuador, where Chinese tourists could travel without a visa, and then sailed 23 hours to the Bahamas.

There, he uploaded the clips to YouTube before boarding another ship to Miami. Upon his arrival in the USA, he applied for American asylum.

During Wednesday’s hearing in Napanoch, N.Y., Guan was asked if his intention to film prison facilities and then release the video days before arriving in the US was to give him grounds to apply for asylum. He said that was not his goal.

“I sympathized with the Uighurs who were persecuted,” Guan told the court through an interpreter, speaking via video link from the Broome County Correctional Facility.

The Chinese government has long denied allegations of rights abuses in Xinjiang. The camps, it says, are not prisons, but vocational training programs to help the local population acquire employable skills while eradicating radical thought.

‘Collateral arrest’ in ICE raid

Chen says his client lived in the US for four years waiting for someone to review his asylum claim.

Then last August ICE came knocking.

Guan lived with roommates in New York, his lawyer said, and they were wanted by ICE when they raided the house, with a warrant.

When they asked Heng how he got to the US, he told the truth. His lawyer called it a “collateral arrest.”

The Department of Homeland Security argued that Guan, who crossed the border illegally, should be deported to Uganda.

US President Donald Trump’s administration frequently deports people to countries they don’t come from, a practice upheld by the US Supreme Court in July.

Guan’s arrest sparked opposition of human rights advocatesas well as American politicians who said his footage helped provide the evidence they needed to pass a 2021 law that blocked imports of goods from Xinjiang.

On Wednesday, Immigration Judge Charles Ouslander told Guan that the court had found him to be a credible witness and had established his legal eligibility for asylum.

He said Guan was right to fear reprisals if he was returned, noting that the Chinese government had questioned his family and inquired about Guan’s whereabouts and past activities.

The ruling was an increasingly rare successful outcome for an asylum seeker since Trump returned to office.

The asylum approval rate fell to 10 percent in 2025, from 28 percent between 2010 and 2024, according to federal data compiled by Mobile Pathways, a California-based nonprofit that helps immigrants navigate the U.S. legal system.

Still awaiting release

Despite the victory, Guan remains behind bars.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has 30 days to decide whether to appeal the ruling. Ouslander urged DHS to make a decision as soon as possible.

DHS did not respond to CBC’s request for comment.