State Dept. believes US legal residents are being held in Chinese detention camps

When asked if there were many, one of the sources said, “No, a few.”They were unable to disclose more details due to privacy concerns, for the time being.At a State Department briefing Thursday, Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback said he had a new, unconfirmed report about a man in California whose father, a legal US resident, had not been heard from since returning to Xinjiang.”He had legal status being here, traveled back to Xinjiang after being here with his son in California. And then has not been heard from since. And he’s deeply concerned about whether, what his treatment is. He has a number of chronic illnesses, he’s a 75-year-old man and an intellectual,” Brownback said.The 2018 State Department Human Rights report estimated that China “arbitrarily detained 800,000 to possibly more than two million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims in internment camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities.””And it’s not just the camps anymore. Entire villages are being encased and people limited on their movement in and out, of the villages in that region that’s occurring as well. The situation continues and in some cases appears to be escalating, not de-escalating,” Brownback said Thursday.”International media, human rights organizations, and former detainees reported security officials in the camps abused, tortured, and killed some detainees,” the report noted.Former detainees say they were forced to endure intensive brainwashing sessions, including close studies of Communist Party propaganda. The Chinese government has defended these camps as a means of fighting what they claim is a rising tide of extremism in Xinjiang. The Chinese government claims that the camps are “vocational and educational training centers for counter-terrorism and de-radicalization purposes.” Brownback said he raised the issue a few weeks ago with Chinese officials at the UN, who first denied anything was happening and then said they were “vocational training camps.””To which I said, ‘I get and have lists of names, hundreds of names that are sent to me, that can’t find their relatives,'” he said.”We are advocating strongly against these actions that the Chinese government is doing and continues to do,” Brownback said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who this week met with Uyghur refugee Mihrigul Tursun and several other members of the Uyghur community, has denounced the human rights violations in China.”This is one of the worst human rights countries that we’ve seen since the 1930s,” he said in a mid-March interview.CNN’s Michael Conte contributed to this report.