The journey from Dallas to the city in northern China involved two planes, three stops and more than 24 hours of travel. Tao, an electronics repairman in his early 30s, spent them wide awake — metal cuffs biting into his wrists and ankles, his mind racing.

He was being deported back to China, after American officials rejected his asylum claim. Questions swirled in his head.

What awaited him back in China, the country that he had tried so hard to escape? Would he be punished? Would he ever leave again?

Tao — whom we are identifying by his first name only in order to protect his family — was part of a record-breaking wave of undocumented Chinese migrants who, during and after the pandemic, made harrowing journeys through the jungles of Central America to the United States. Many, including Tao, were not high-profile dissidents but ordinary Chinese who felt suffocated by their government’s tightening grip on society and discouraged by dimming economic prospects.

Tao presented himself at the southern border in Texas and applied for political asylum, confident he would be accepted by a system he believed was open and liberal. The odds for any undocumented migrants applying for asylum in the United States are slim, but Chinese applicants have had a slightly higher success rate — in 2023, 11 percent of undocumented Chinese migrants like Tao were granted asylum.

But Tao’s claim was denied, even as others like him were getting through, as the Biden administration toughened its stance on illegal immigration.