At first, Mihrigul Tursun speaks with remarkable control.
Sitting in Washington in a neatly pressed blue suit, the 35-year-old Uyghur mother answers questions softly, almost cautiously. But once the memories begin, they arrive all at once, in vivid and painful detail, as though the years separating her from China’s detention system no longer exist.
The story pours out of her in relentless detail, one memory collapsing into another: the underground cells, the interrogations, the women screaming at night, the smell of overcrowded prison rooms, the body of her infant son lying motionless in her arms as she desperately tried to warm him back to life.
For Tursun, the horror is not something she remembers. It is something she says she continues to live with every day.
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And always, there is fear.
Not fear for herself, exactly. That, she suggests, stopped mattering long ago.
The fear is for the family members she believes remain vulnerable inside China because she chose to publicly describe what happened to her, only because of her faith.
Her story unfolds as President Donald Trump visits China this week for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, with trade, security and regional tensions dominating headlines. But for Tursun, China is not an abstract geopolitical rival. It is the country she says destroyed her family, shattered her health and left psychological wounds she still struggles to survive every day.
She says she speaks publicly because too few people who survived China’s detention system are able, or willing, to tell the world what they saw.
“People think this only happened in history,” she said. “But it is still happening.”
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Tursun was born in Xinjiang, the far western region China officially calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, home to millions of Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority with their own language and culture. For years, human rights groups, researchers and former detainees have accused Beijing of carrying out mass detention, forced labor, political indoctrination and severe religious repression against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
China denies the allegations, describing the facilities as vocational training centers aimed at combating extremism and terrorism.
Tursun says her own relationship with the Chinese state began long before the camps.
At age 10, she said, she was sent by the government to study inside China in Mandarin-language schools designed to assimilate Uyghur children into mainstream Chinese society.
“They educate us as Chinese mind,” she said.
Years later, she moved to Egypt to study business administration. There, she married an Egyptian man and gave birth to triplets in 2015: two boys and a girl.
The children were only two months old when her parents urged her to return to China so they could meet their grandchildren and help care for them.
Tursun resisted at first. The babies were too young to travel, she told them. But her mother insisted it was urgent.
On May 12, 2015, she boarded a flight to China carrying the newborns.
She says the nightmare began almost immediately after landing in Beijing.
At the airport, two people approached and offered to help carry the babies through border control. Moments later, she said, they identified themselves as police officers.
“They say, ‘Keep silent. Follow us,’” she recalled.
Tursun said officers separated her from the children and interrogated her for hours about her time in Egypt, asking whether she had participated in political activities or anti-Chinese events. She repeatedly asked to see her babies, explaining they needed to be breastfed.
Instead, she says officers placed a black hood over her head, handcuffed her and transferred her to detention in Xinjiang.
There, she says, interrogations and torture began.
Weeks later, authorities temporarily released her after informing her that one of her children was sick. Escorted by police to a hospital in Urumqi, she found her surviving son and daughter separated on different floors, connected to oxygen tubes.
The next day, doctors handed her paperwork to sign.
At the top, she said, were the words: “Death certification.”
The document bore the name of her infant son. “They say, ‘This is your son,’” she recalled softly.
Doctors refused to explain what had happened, she said. Because she was considered a political suspect, she says no one would answer her questions.
For three days, she kept her son’s body with her at her parents’ home under constant police surveillance.
As Muslims, the family wanted to bring the child to a mosque and bury him according to religious tradition, she said, but authorities would not allow anyone to see the body.
“The body stayed with me three days,” she said. “I try to give him warmth. I try to let him wake up.”
He never opened his eyes again, she says as tears filled her eyes.
Following her son’s burial, she says authorities expelled her family from their home and detained her again. Between 2015 and 2018, she was transferred between multiple prisons and detention facilities where she endured psychological abuse, interrogations and torture.
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One memory still haunts her more than any other.
During an interrogation, she says officers mocked her faith after she told them God would punish them for what they were doing.
“Chinese Communist Party is God,” she recalled them saying. “Xi Jinping is God.”
Then, she said, officers shaved her hair and applied electric shocks to her head until she lost consciousness.
Tursun also described what she says were systematic medical examinations performed on detainees, including blood tests and organ screenings. Similar allegations from former detainees have fueled longstanding accusations by activists and researchers that Chinese authorities harvested organs from prisoners of conscience, claims Beijing has repeatedly denied.
Inside one detention facility, she says more than 60 women were packed into a small cell under constant surveillance. Some had not seen sunlight for more than a year, she claimed.
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Many of the women were educated professionals: teachers, doctors, neighbors she recognized from outside prison.
Others were barely more than children.
She recalled one 17-year-old Uyghur girl from a remote village who had never traveled outside her hometown and asked basic questions about the outside world, like how people can fit inside airplanes.
Weeks later, Tursun says, guards took the teenager away. When she returned, she appeared bloodied and severely traumatized. She was sexually attacked.
Two months later, the girl died. Tursun broke into tears. “No one care about that.”
She says guards dragged the girl’s body away “like trash.”
Eventually, her husband was able to locate her and the children, and after the Egyptian authorities intervened, she was allowed to leave China — after both of them signed to never talk about their experience.
Today, Tursun lives in the United States with her surviving children after eventually receiving refuge following congressional testimony in 2018 about her experiences in China.
In many ways, she is among the fortunate few.
Her children are alive. They are safe. They are growing up in America rather than under constant state surveillance in Xinjiang.
But survival, she says, is not the same thing as healing.
Her physical health remains fragile. So does her mental health. She says trauma follows her constantly, affecting her sleep, her memory and even ordinary daily routines.
“There is no one hour I forget,” she said.
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Sometimes, she admitted quietly, she no longer wants to continue living.
It is her children, she says, who keep her going. And the obligation she feels toward the women she left behind.
The women whose faces she still remembers. The women she watched deteriorate inside the camps. The women she says died there. That obligation, she says, is stronger than fear.
Former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, who interviewed Tursun for his recent book on religious persecution in China, believes stories like hers expose what he describes as the Chinese Communist Party’s deepest insecurity.
“This is the issue they fear the most: religious freedom,” Brownback said during an interview in Washington as Trump arrived in Beijing.
“President Trump, you’re the president that’s done more on religious freedom than any modern president… You need to take this message to President Xi Jinping and his crushing of religion in China.”
“Our fight is not with the Chinese people,” he added. “It’s with the party.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Chinese Embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said the Chinese government protects “freedom of religious belief in accordance with the law” and argued that people of all ethnic groups in China enjoy religious freedom. Liu pointed to official figures showing nearly 200 million religious believers in China, along with more than 380,000 clerical personnel, approximately 5,500 religious groups and more than 140,000 registered places of worship.
Liu said Beijing regulates religious affairs involving “national interests and the public interest” while opposing what it describes as illegal or criminal activities carried out under the guise of religion. He also accused foreign countries and media outlets of interfering in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of religious freedom and urged journalists to “respect the facts” and stop what he described as “attacking and smearing” China’s religious policies and religious freedom record.
As the interview ended, Tursun gathered herself slowly before stepping back out into the streets of Washington.
To strangers passing by, she looked like any other young mother moving through the city.
Only she carries memories most people cannot imagine.