Kamaltürk Yalqun’s father was sentenced to 15 years in a Chinese prison early last year. As a prominent Uighur scholar and writer, he was among the first to be swept up in October 2016 as China embarked on its largest detention campaign since the Cultural Revolution. “Whether you become an activist or not, it doesn’t matter. If you are a Uighur, you will be a target,” Yalqun said.

On Tuesday, Yalqun was among nearly 200 protesters rallying outside the United Nation headquarters in Manhattan to plead for greater international attention to China’s accelerating detention of Uighur and other Muslim minorities in its northwestern region of Xinjiang. One told me Chinese agents called him three weeks ago to warn against drawing attention to the detention of his parents and brother, a popular singer—neither had a past history of activism, he said. Another recounted the detention of her aunt and sister—also without a history of political involvement, she said. All of these protesters had decided to risk harassment from a rising superpower determined to thwart any criticism of its sweeping campaign.

These detained relatives are now part of a sobering figure: The U.S. State Department estimates that between 800,000 and two million people are being held indefinitely in a sprawling network of more than 1,000 Chinese internment camps. Up until October last year, the Chinese government denied their existence. Now, they say they are “vocational training centers” meant to curb extremism. But human rights organizations say the camps are being used to sever Uighurs’ ties to Islam.

The protest aimed to generate support for the Uighur Human Rights Policy Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced in Congress last month that would sanction Chinese officials and companies involved with the internment camps. It comes amidst tougher attitudes toward Beijing, particularly from the Trump White House, on issues like trade, national security and technology.

The international community’s response to mass detention in China has been “anemic” so far, Sophie Richardson, the China Director of Human Rights Watch told me. Western diplomats and U.N. human rights officials have denounced China’s actions in Xinjiang, and Vice President Mike Pence is the most senior Trump administration figure to condemn it. But as of yet, the administration’s intense focus on tariffs to punish Chinese trade malfeasance has not included threats of targeted sanctions to punish human rights violations. “What does it say when a permanent member of the UN Security Council can do this in view of the whole world?” Richardson said, referring to China’s mass detention program. “We can’t say we didn’t know.”