Even when Uyghur women are free of China’s territory, they do not feel safe from its reach. Those who have left Xinjiang face imprisonment if they return home and persistent insecurity abroad. My @TheAtlantic story in partnership with @FullerProject: https://bit.ly/3s4rplo 

Uyghurs abroad holding Chinese passports often end up stateless as their travel document expires. PRC consular officials do not renew passports — instead they provide a one-way travel doc to China. Divided Uyghur families have meant stateless, de facto single mothers overseas.

"The Uyghur crackdown needs to be understood as 'a multifaceted crisis,' @ZumretErkin, an advocacy manager at @UyghurCongress, told me. 'International attention has been on the camps for so long that so many other aspects of this crisis have been ignored.'"

One of the things that I really came away with is the fact these Uyghur family separations can never be resolved, even if everyone is somehow one day reunited. There is a toll on husbands and wives who go through life for years separated, with different lived experiences.

Uyghur asylum applicants in the US have in some cases waited HALF A DECADE for a decision on their status. US Citizenship and Immigration Services faces a backlog of more than 370,0000 asylum apps, and the Trump admin was in no hurry to deal with any this. What will Biden do?

And in another reminder of how counterproductive China's policies in Xinjiang has been: "She had once lived in Beijing as a student, and considered herself a citizen of China. 'I never thought China could ever be this dark,' she told me, 'this heartless.'"

Thank you to @katerinareports @prashantrao @KhushbuOShea @Amie_FR for your support to make this story happen.

One more to this thread: @amnesty recently released this report about Uyghurs overseas separated from their children/partners/family members trapped in China, if you'd like to read more on this issue: https://bit.ly/3s7ogkE