After years of publicly criticizing China s collective punishment of the Uighurs , a millions-strong ethnic and religious minority community, the U.S. is now finally considering tough new sanctions on Beijing. But Washingtons bid to create international opposition to the Chinese crackdown faces long odds and for now, some of the U.S.s own allies continue to support Chinas campaign.

Late last month, two plainclothes men in the United Arab Emirates, a close U.S. partner, arrested Abuduljilili Supi, a 27-year-old Uighur man from China, after afternoon prayers. Three days later, Supi called his wife and told her he was in a UAE detention facility and believed he was going to be sent back to China, where the government has placed an estimated 1 million people, most of them Uighurs, in secretive internment camps over the past two years.

Supi urged his wife to leave the UAE, and his family is now desperate to ensure he isnt sent away, his brother Abdul Mijit told HuffPost. They dont know whether he has already been deported and theyve had no luck getting answers from UAE authorities.

If he is returned to China, I cannot imagine his life, Mijit said.

Beijings finely honed ability to persuade key countries to help with its dirty work will be one of the main hurdles to the U.S. and United Nations new efforts to open up the camps to investigators and ultimately end the massive human rights violations. The Chinese governments years of success in cultivating business relationships and behind-the-scenes channels with foreign officials, particularly in autocratic contexts like the UAE, will likely help it avoid the kind of revelations and effective public pressure that might force a real change in policy.

The UAE ambassador in Washington did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the case.

Chinas ruling Communist Party has viewed Uighurs and other minority non-Han Chinese groups in the northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang as a threat for decades, treating them as potential separatist or extremist militants. These minorities have been subject to wholesale surveillance and government intimidation after isolated members of their communities carried out terror attacks. Thousands of Uighurs have fled China in recent years, aiming to get to Turkey because of their Turkic ethnic background or heading to Southeast and Central Asia, Europe, Australia and the U.S.

Fearing their platform to criticize China and share whats happening in the tightly controlled Uighur homeland of Xinjiang, China has successfully pressured multiple countries to deport Uighurs who have traveled abroad back to China.

Caving to Chinese pressure, such as Beijings sudden changes to Uighurs permissions to be abroad, many of those nations have used their own security services to round up Chinese minorities. Cambodia sent Uighurs back in 2009. Malaysia did so in 2012. Thailand followed suit in 2015. And in 2017, close U.S. ally Egypt detained more than 100 Uighurs and deported dozens to China.

To send people back under these circumstances is to knowingly subject them to life in what experts deem an open-air prison. Practically every Uighur family now has at least one member locked up for re-education and those outside the camps are closely monitored through tactics that go as far as placing officials in their homes for extended periods of time.

Authorities should realize that Uighurs forced back to China disappear into a black hole , said Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watchs Asia division, when Thailand was mulling the fate of Uighurs discovered in a remote jungle camp. Beijing has a duty to provide public order, but it has no business trying to compel other governments to violate international law, or violate the rights of ethnic minorities within its own borders.