The U.S. State Department has imposed visa sanctions on an unspecified number of current and former Thai officials for their role in last month’s deportation of 40 Uyghur asylum seekers to China.
In a statement on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was immediately moving to impose visa restrictions on “current or former foreign government officials responsible for, or complicit in, the forced return of Uyghurs or members of other ethnic or religious groups with protection concerns to China.”
“We are committed to combating China’s efforts to pressure governments to forcibly return Uyghurs and other groups to China, where they are subject to torture and enforced disappearances,” Rubio added.
The 40 asylum seekers were taken from the Immigration Detention Center in Bangkok and placed aboard a charter flight to Kashgar in a secretive operation in the early hours of February 27, despite Thai government assurances that they would not be refouled to China. The 40 men were part of a group of more than 300 Uyghur Muslims who were detained by Thai authorities in 2014 after fleeing China’s Xinjiang region, 109 of whom were deported to China in 2015.
Rubio’s statement did not name any of the Thai officials, nor did it specify what sort of visa restrictions would apply to them. But according to the Associated Press, such restrictions “can entail a denial of entry to the U.S.”
In a statement responding to Rubio’s announcement, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeated Bangkok’s previous claim that it had received assurances from China that the deportees would not be harmed, and that Thai officials would be traveling soon to Xinjiang to check up on their well-being.
“Thailand has always upheld a long tradition of humanitarianism, particularly in providing assistance to displaced persons from various countries for more than half a century and will continue to do so,” the ministry said in a statement.
The deportation prompted an outcry from human rights groups, foreign governments, and the United Nations, which stated that the group faced “a real risk of torture, ill-treatment, or other irreparable harm upon their return.” Rubio’s State Department was among the chorus of critics, condemning “in the strongest possible terms” their deportation to China, “where they lack due process rights and where Uyghurs have faced persecution, forced labor, and torture.”
It is not surprising that the State Department felt the need to respond more forcefully to the deportation. As Carolyn Nash of the advocacy group Amnesty International noted in these pages last week, the fate of the Uyghurs was the subject of “bipartisan concern” in Washington. During his Senate confirmation hearings in January, Rubio promised that he would lobby Thailand against the deportations. In particular, he said that the issue would provide “one more opportunity for us to remind the world” about China’s horrific treatment of the Uyghurs.
At the same time, the announcement is inconsistent with the broader tendencies of the Trump administration. The same day as Rubio’s announcement, President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing most of the funding of the United States Agency for Global Media, a federal agency that funds a host of news organizations including Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Collectively, these outlets have done a huge amount of work to bring the plight of the Uyghurs to light, to say nothing of their work in repressive countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. Whatever the reasoning behind this decision, it was not the move of an administration that wants to cast a spotlight on Chinese human rights violations.
While Rubio has to some extent assimilated himself to the administration’s “America First” theatrics – as seen by his recent decision to declare the South African ambassador to Washington persona non grata via a hysterical post on X – he is clearly a more “traditional” political figure who, as Nash noted, feels a need to defend a political identity built “in large part on hawkish, pro-human rights opposition to the government of China.”
The resulting output is a confusing hodgepodge of domestic and foreign policies in which one seeks a consistent theme or thread in vain. The U.S. government has always been vulnerable to the accusation that it has only adopted the Uyghur issue with such alacrity as a means of attacking China. But with the administration seeking to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the former graduate student who led pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, on flimsy grounds, the gap between U.S. rhetoric and actions has now widened to a chasm. As a result, fewer foreign countries, Thailand included, are likely to take much notice of the administration’s avowed concerns about law and high principle.