Republican Miami Mayor Francis Suarez admitted during an interview with Hugh Hewitt this week that he was completely unaware of one of the largest human rights issues in the world.

Suarez, a long-shot Republican presidential candidate, was asked by Hewitt about the Uyghurs, a minority group in China who are locked up in concentration camps and forced into re-education facilities.

After talking briefly about China, Hewitt asked Suarez, “Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?”

“The what?” Suarez responded.

“The Uyghurs,” Hewitt said.

“What’s a Uyghur?” Suarez asked.

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Hugh Hewitt: “Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?”

2024 GOP presidential candidate Francis Suarez: “What's a Uyghur?” pic.twitter.com/AlRkjZCJyK

— The Recount (@therecount) June 27, 2023

Several minutes later, at the end of the interview, Suarez said, “And you gave me homework, Hugh.”

“I’ll look at what a, what was it, what did you call it, a Weeble?” Suarez said laughingly.

“The Uyghurs. You really need to know about the Uyghurs, Mayor,” Hewitt, who was not laughing, responded. “You’ve got to talk about it every day, okay?”

“I'll look at — what’d you call it, a ‘Weeble?’”

— 2024 GOP presidential candidate Francis Suarez on Uyghurs pic.twitter.com/wAW8lGg0IK

— The Recount (@therecount) June 27, 2023

Reports have surfaced in recent years of violent gang rape against the Uyghurs and other religious minorities detained in the Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang.

Qelbinur Sidik, who was forced to teach inside the camps, made allegations in an interview published by CNN in 2021. Sidik’s story begins by noting that a policewoman told her very early on that she had been assigned to investigate reports of rapes and torture taking place at the facility. Sidik said that the policewoman described to her how the male guards at the camp often bragged while drinking about how they “raped and tortured girls.”

Sidik said that her first encounter with new detainees was approximately 100 men and women who were chained in shackles around their hands and feet. She said that even those that came in physically and mentally strong eventually were broken by the brutal system that the communist Chinese had installed in the camps, where an estimated nearly 2 million religious minorities are being detained. She said that she witnessed “horrific traged[ies]” while working at the camp where women were regularly “crying loudly.”

Another witness, Tursunay Ziyawudun, told CNN that she committed no crime when she was sent to the camps. After a month in the camp, authorities released Ziyawudun, only to arrest her a short time later for a nine-month “nightmare.” Ziyawudun, who is now in the U.S., told CNN that large numbers women were often crammed into small spaces, allowed minimal time to basic facilities like toilets, and were brutally punished for small things like using the facilities for too long.

During an interrogation session, Ziyawudun said that she was beaten so intensely that she passed out. Another time, guards forced her on to a table where they “inserted a stun baton” inside her and “twisted and shocked” her until she “blacked out” from the pain. A couple of weeks later she was ganged raped by several men, an experience she said happened to her multiple times while in the camps.

“They were extremely sadistic, causing pain and damage to the body by beating and smacking my head on the wall,” Ziyawudun said, “It was their way of punishing us.”

The Chinese spy balloon that President Joe Biden allowed to fly over the U.S. earlier this year was reportedly carrying American-made hardware to capture reconnaissance imagery.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the multiple federal agencies discovered that the balloon was “crammed with commercially available U.S. gear, some of it for sale online, and interspersed with more specialized Chinese sensors and other equipment to collect photos, video and other information to transmit to China.”

The report also said that the spy balloon had large solar panels to power it and that it was able to capture “radar data.”

China has threatened the U.S. against making details from its investigation into the balloon public, claiming that they will be forced to respond in a harsh manner.

The Biden administration has so far cowered to China’s demands and has not shared details from the investigation with the public, even though the U.S. has a history of doing so with other nations.

Republican senators have called out the Biden administration over its refusal to show the public what China was flying over sensitive U.S. military installations.

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In a letter to White House earlier this month, the senators wrote in-part:

In your State of the Union address this year, you promised the American people that you would protect the United States from the PRC’s threats to our sovereignty. While four months have passed since a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to fly across the United States, your administration has yet to provide the American people a full accounting of how this spy platform was allowed to traverse across sovereign U.S. territory, what the balloon carried, and what it collected during its mission. Your administration has also not taken appropriate steps to hold the PRC accountable for this flagrant violation of U.S. sovereignty. As such, we urge you to immediately direct all relevant administration officials to release information, as appropriate, to the American public regarding the Chinese spy balloon.

The senators who signed the letter were Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Rick Scott (R-FL), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), Ted Budd, (R-NC), Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), Jim Risch (R-ID), John Cornyn (R-TX), James Lankford (R-OK), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Bill Hagerty (R-TN).