Last month, Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow became an overnight sensation in progressive circles. After a colleague accused her of trying to “groom and sexualize kindergartners,” McMorrow delivered a raw and emotional speech that neither shied away from progressive social stances nor consented to fighting the battle on that territory. “People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health-care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession,” she said.

James Carville, the famed Democratic strategist and critic of liberal focus on social issues, gushed that it was an “enormously effective piece of communication,” adding, “There’s really no comeback to it.” In The New Yorker, David Remnick anointed her “a role model for the midterms.” The rapturous response to McMorrow’s speech underscores the Democratic Party’s struggle to find a reply to Republicans in this election cycle and the perilous environment its candidates face.

New polling data from Navigator, a Democratic firm, released today, show that Democrats start at a deficit on culture-war issues, but that people exist who might be described as potential Mallory McMorrow voters. They are the swing voters in the culture war, and they are disproportionately young, moderate, white, and parents.

To produce the data, Navigator asked a sample of voters whether Republicans were focused on the right or wrong issues. A plurality, 47 percent, said Republicans were focused on the right things; 44 percent said they were not. Next, respondents were asked about a series of GOP policy initiatives, including book bans in schools and libraries, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and overturning Roe v. Wade. (The survey was done before a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe leaked last week.) Then pollsters asked once again whether Republicans were focused on the right or wrong issues. This time, 52 percent said they were focused on the wrong issues, and 42 on the right ones.

For years, voters have tended to trust Republicans more on economic issues, and to see Democrats as the party of social issues such as racial equality and LGBTQ rights. That’s a particular problem for Democrats heading into the midterm elections, because they’re the party in power and voters are reeling under high inflation and a suddenly shaky economy.

[Read: The Democrats’ midterm identity crisis]

The problem is somewhat ironic. Democrats have been intensely focused on the economy; they just haven’t managed to get the results they want. Joe Biden began his term with a huge infrastructure bill, and his party has been trying (and failing) to pass a second economic package ever since. At the same time, Republican governments in red states have been waging a vigorous culture war, exemplified by Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and attempt at punitive tax changes against Disney. National Republican leaders, too, have declined to present any economic agenda, following the old dictum of never interfering when your opponent is making a mistake.

More intriguing than the reversal of views on GOP policies is the profile of the voters who changed their view. They are more likely to identify as moderate than the general electorate (46 versus 34 percent). More of them are white women (42 versus 36 percent). They are more likely to have graduated high school than the general population, but only 30 percent of them are college educated, and they are more likely to make less than $50,000 a year. Many of them are parents—39 percent versus 27 percent—and they are more likely to identify as pro-choice.

In short, these aren’t the college-educated, relatively comfortable suburban women with whom the Democratic Party has made inroads the past few election cycles. These people are likely to be squeezed hard by inflation, and they may also be among the voters most frustrated by school closures during the pandemic. “These are not Whole Foods moms, but Sam’s Club moms or Costco moms,” says Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way.

[Molly Jong-Fast: Democrats need to stand up for themselves]

Erickson told me that Third Way research found that voters in Virginia who voted for Biden in 2020 and then switched to the successful Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in 2021 resembled the swing bloc here: lots of suburban parents and non-college-educated women, of all races. They didn’t necessarily buy into a panic about “critical race theory” being taught in schools, but they did feel that Democrats were looking at the wrong issues.

If they voted, their opposition to GOP culture-war issues might make them vote Democratic, and they are a big enough group to make a significant difference in election results. Navigator’s polling found that they opposed the signature Republican culture-war priorities by wider margins than the general population, often 15 to 20 percentage points. Republican leaders have mostly avoided policy proposals ahead of the midterms, but Navigator asked about economic policies proposed by Senator Rick Scott and found that this subset of the population overwhelmingly disliked those too. But many of them aren’t voting: Only 59 percent of the group voted in 2020, versus 71 percent of the overall electorate.

This group of voters who might not otherwise cast a ballot and don’t like Republican ideas is an opportunity for Democrats, says Bryan Bennett, Navigator’s lead pollster. “Progressives need to be going on offense: ‘They’re not focused on lowering costs. They’re focused on banning books in your children’s schools.’”

But Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that in his view, the findings are less than meets the eye. The fact that these voters are less engaged in politics makes them more susceptible to changing their mind in a closed polling situation.

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

“It’s clearly downplaying many of the least popular things that a bunch of progressive Democrats are talking about and zeroing in on some of the least popular things that Republicans are talking about,” he said. “I could very easily flip the tables on this by talking about how the GOP is focused on securing our border, bringing down inflation, and keeping schools open, but Dems want to defund the police and pass a gigantic social-welfare package.”

That may be true, but the new focus on Roe has galvanized abortion advocates and may have aided Democrats by thrusting conservative culture-war priorities into the center of political debate. Even so, progressives are still likely to struggle to seize the opportunity. In the real world, Democrats are not known for their message discipline. At the moment, for example, two factions of the party are engaged in a drawn-out battle over student-loan forgiveness, even though student debt barely registers in opinion polls.

Beyond that, if elected Democrats start talking about unpopular Republican social policies, they risk reinforcing the idea that they are focused on social policies rather than economic ones. Candidates will be looking in part to outside groups to take up the banner. “This is our job, to make these stakes very clear to voters heading into the fall. They want to talk about banning books and banning birth control and banning democracy, and we have a plan to rein in greedy CEOs,” Nita Chaudhary, the chief of campaigns at the progressive group MoveOn, told me. She and her allies will have their work cut out for them.

Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, the spring weather’s just barely warming, but regulators in the United States are already wringing their hands over a tricksy fall brew: the contents of the COVID shot that vaccine makers are prepping for autumn, when all eligible Americans may be asked to dose up yet again (if, that is, Congress coughs up the money to actually buy the vaccines). In a recent advisory meeting convened by the FDA, Peter Marks, the director of the agency’s Center of Biologics Evaluation and Research, acknowledged the “very compressed time frame” in which experts will need to finalize the inoculation’s ingredients—probably, he said, by the end of June.

Which is, for the record, right around the corner. A big choice is looming. And whatever version of the virus that scientists select for America’s next jab is “probably going to be the wrong one,” says Allie Greaney, who studies the push and pull between viruses and the immune system at the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

Unavoidably, several months will separate the selection of this autumn’s vaccine and the deployment of said shot. That’s eons in coronavirus time. Half a year ago, we were all still living in Delta’s world; now a whole gaggle of Omicrons are running the show. Any decision that scientists make in June will have to involve assumptions about how SARS-CoV-2 will shape-shift in the future, which exactly no one is eager to make. “We keep getting burned,” says Adam Lauring, a virologist at the University of Michigan. Perhaps the virus will stay on its Omicron bender, making an Omicron vaccine—a favorite for the fall’s jab jubilee—sound like a no-brainer. Or perhaps by the time summer’s through, it will have moved on to a Rho, Sigma, or Chi that sproings out from somewhere totally unexpected and undermines that Omicron shot. With so many people around the world harboring some degree of immunity, the virus is being forced to continually reinvent itself, and no one knows what new costumes it might try on next.

[Read: We might not need annual COVID shots]

Our choice of fall shot, then, is inevitably going to be a gamble and a guess. But with the clock ticking down, most of the experts I’ve been talking with think an ingredient swap is wise, and probably inevitable. “We should be updating the vaccines now or yesterday,” said Jonathan Abraham, a physician and immunologist at Harvard Medical School. Modeled on the version of the virus that kick-started the crisis more than two years ago, our current crop of immunizations is still guarding against severe illness and death. But that OG variant has long since fizzled out—leaving our shots, in this one sense, frozen in the past, while the real SARS-CoV-2 continues to race ahead. A 2022 revamp might finally give our vaccines a chance to close some of that gap.

The decision that regulators make in early summer won’t just be about a boost. In the recent advisory meeting, Marks emphasized that any vaccine updates would be expected to be comprehensive, replacing old formulations as both boosters and primary-series doses; after the changeover, people who haven’t gotten their first doses—who number in the tens of millions in the U.S. alone, and would include future generations of kids—might not be able to nab an original-recipe shot. “We would not be going backwards,” Marks told the committee. “It would be too confusing and potentially dangerous to have different regimens.”

The same system shuffles the populace through a new flu-shot formulation year after year, and it usually works just fine. Those viruses have been twining themselves into the human population for centuries; host and pathogen have settled into an uneasy rhythm, with a more or less set flu season playing out in most parts of the world each year. Last year’s successful flu strains tend to give rise to this year’s, which then sire next year’s—a phenomenon scientists call “ladder-like evolution,” because of its soothing stepwise shape. To concoct the forthcoming season’s flu shot, “we do surveillance; we figure out what to be prepared for,” Lauring told me. With SARS-CoV-2, however, “the dynamics are still so wacky.” Waves of infection crest and crash in different countries every few months; the virus is still sloshing out new variants and subvariants at breakneck speed. The emergence of coronavirus iterations has also been less ladder-ish and more radial, like spokes erupting out of the center of a bicycle wheel: Alpha did not beget Delta, which did not birth Omicron.

In recent months, though, the virus appears to have taken a different tack. Since the end of 2021, nearly everything’s been coming up Omicron. From BA.1 (a.k.a. Omicron classic) to BA.2, and now the rising BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5, the last few viral successions have all occurred within the Omicron clan. So our next move might seem obvious: counter with an Omicron-centric vaccine, a switch some experts have been favoring for months. On that front, Moderna and Pfizer might soon deliver. The two vaccine makers have each been testing, among other options, bespoke BA.1 versions of their shots that they say could be ready within the next few months, just in time for a pre-winter inoculation push. “We plan to have a data readout soon,” Jerica Pitts, a spokesperson for Pfizer, wrote in an email.

[Read: Why can’t we just call BA.2 Omicron?]

By numbers alone, there is a pretty strong likelihood that more BA-whatever subvariants will come down the pike. And as a booster, especially, an Omicron shot could have clear perks, shoring up the defenses laid down by previous doses while also, ideally, pushing a new batch of immune cells to wise up to the variant’s unique and never-before-seen quirks, says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington. The hope is that Pfizer’s and Moderna’s data will back that notion up and show that people boosted with Omicron’s spike are better at duking it out with most of the BA fam than those who are injected with the original recipe again. But there’s also a chance that the evidence won’t bear this out. A smattering of recent studies, some in animals, hint that chasing an original-recipe shot with something Omicron-y might not push the body to develop a ton of Omicron-specific defenses, at least not at first; studied head-to-head, a BA.1 booster and an OG booster performed about the same. Pepper still has faith that a lesson on Omicron’s spike will pay dividends—the effects just might take more time to unspool. Taia Wang, an immunologist at Stanford, agrees. “Boosting with Omicron will almost certainly provide more immunity against currently circulating strains,” she told me. Currently could quickly become previously, though, if another variant elbows in. Although the virus’s evolution might look sort of, kind of, more stepwise right now, “we’ve seen the different lineages pass the baton back and forth,” Siobain Duffy, a virologist at Rutgers University, told me. “There’s absolutely nothing stopping a similar large jump in SARS-CoV-2 evolution from happening again.”

Perhaps the bigger worry is whether BA.1 will end up being a terrible teacher when deployed as an unvaccinated person’s starter shot. The variant’s bizarro-looking spike, so unlike any that came before it, is such an outlier that it may fail to show an unsavvy immune system how to recognize other morphs of SARS-CoV-2. That’s not a problem if the future of the virus stays hooked on Omicron. But should it be booted by another variant more resembling Alpha, Delta, or something else, bodies schooled on BA.1 alone might be ill-prepared. Pfizer, which is testing a triple-Omicron series in a group of previously unjabbed people, could produce data to the contrary. Absent those, a premature pivot to Omicron might bias immune systems toward the wrong track.

[Read: Should we go all in on Omicron vaccines?]

If an Omicron-only vaccine is starting to sound like a possible lose-lose situation, maybe it’s no surprise that the experts I spoke with ran the entire gamut of opinions about it. “If I could get an Omicron booster now, I definitely would,” Wang told me. Harvard’s Abraham said that he’s in the same boat. Meanwhile, John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of several scientists who said that option’s a “nope”—safer, they said, to keep something with OG. The most common refrain, though, was, I’m not sure, and I’m glad I’m not the one deciding.

There could still be a quasi-compromise: a dose that includes two spike variations, maybe more, in the same shot. So-called bi- and multivalent vaccines are already in the works; both Moderna and Pfizer are slurrying together spikes from BA.1 and the OG coronavirus variant, a recipe that Moderna executives have repeatedly described as their “lead candidate for fall 2022.” That tactic could simultaneously enhance and focus the body’s defenses, says Lexi Walls, a biochemist and vaccine developer at the University of Washington. Such combo shots are the wary vaccinologist’s hedge: They might offer both a reminder of a version of the virus that most immune systems have already seen, as well as a preview of what might still be to come.

Cramming several spikes together isn’t a perfect solution. A recipe that’s half BA.1 and half OG won’t necessarily yield an immune response that splits the difference. Such a concoction also doesn’t fully solve the problems of an Omicron-only vaccine. The pesky delay between design and deployment always puts the humans behind: BA.1 may no longer be the most relevant form of Omicron to use, because it’s rapidly being ousted by speedier siblings. And a body trained on BA.1 might have some trouble tussling with some of its more irksome kin, which appear to circumvent some of the antibodies their predecessor lays down. The BA subvariants, for now, share the name Omicron, but in reality, some of them are “just as divergent as some of the variants of concern that have their own Greek letter,” says Jemma Geoghegan, a virologist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand.

Several experts, including UW’s Greaney and Michigan’s Lauring, told me that, in an ideal world, they would have liked to see BA.2’s spike slotted into the next shot instead. That’s not necessarily a reason to forgo an upgrade to BA.1, though, because that could still better familiarize bodies with other Omicron offshoots than if they were left none the wiser. Strain-vaccine mismatches happen all the time with flu shots, Geogeghan points out, and even so, those vaccines “are still really good at protecting against severe disease and death.”

Experts won’t know for sure how bivalent vaccines will fare until Moderna and Pfizer publish data from their ongoing trials. Omicron-only shots might outperform them; original-recipe boosters might still trounce them all; none of those data will have clear bearing on the next theoretical variant to rise. Abraham, for one, isn’t quite sold on the idea of a bivalent vaccine. “We don’t know what the second-best antigen would be” after Omicron’s spike, he told me; pick the wrong one, and it may just end up wasting space in shots. He’d prefer to lean into Omicron’s ongoing monopoly, he said, and model the next shot on only that. (Moderna is also trialing a Beta-OG bivalent shot—remember Beta?—that the company says is performing well, even against BA.1.)

Vaccines may not always need to lag variants this much. Geogeghan expects that the pace at which new, antibody-dodging variants sprout off the coronavirus family tree will eventually slow down. And researchers such as Walls, at UW, are working on universal vaccines that may be able to guard against a whole menagerie of coronavirus iterations—perhaps even ones that haven’t yet been detected—so that the game of variant whack-a-mole can end.

Until then, experts are working with limited options, based on limited data—and there is yet another option that may feel like the easiest of all: Do nothing, and stick with the vaccines we have. They are, after all, still performing extraordinarily well, especially when delivered in full rounds of at least three doses; it’s what’s known, and maybe, what feels safe. Among the dozen-plus experts I spoke with for this piece, there wasn’t consensus on what our next vaccine’s main ingredients should be. Still, most agreed on this: The worst thing to do would be to stay stagnant with our shots—to miss an opportunity to move our understanding forward when the virus has already gained so much ground. “We’re always playing catch-up,” says Karthik Gangavarapu, a computational biologist at UCLA. “But if we don’t do anything, we’re for sure not going to be able to win the race.”

To avoid drawing unwanted attention, Tommy and the four others dressed as if they were heading out for a leisurely day. It was July 2020, and the weather was perfect for some time on the water. The young men acted as though they knew one another well, and were excited to reconnect. But inside, Tommy felt panicked and desperate. He was about to attempt an escape from Hong Kong, where he faced a near-certain jail sentence for his role in the prodemocracy protests there. He feared that he, or one of these strangers, might have been tailed by police to the docks.

In the scenario that kept replaying in his head, officers closed in on the men as they stood next to their boat, a roughly 20-foot rigid speedboat laden with jugs of extra fuel and fishing equipment. Tommy—who asked to be identified by a nickname—didn’t allow himself to relax until the boat sped away from land, the coastline shrinking behind them and the blue sky stretching out in front.

As the boat’s hull slapped against the rolling swells, the life vests the men carried flew overboard, but they didn’t bother to turn back. One leaned over the edge and peeled identifying numbers off the boat’s bow, hoping for an extra layer of anonymity. They took turns driving—the young men had learned their elementary boating skills from watching videos on YouTube and had practiced a handful of times. No matter who was behind the wheel, they kept the engine throttle wide open and scanned the horizon for trouble. The whipping wind and the din of the motors made communication nearly impossible. The sun set. The lights of fishing boats and enormous shipping vessels bobbed up and down.

Tommy lost track of how long they’d been driving the boat—at least 10 hours. When the GPS unit showed the vessel leaving Hong Kong waters, they finally eased off on the throttle. “We knew we were safe,” Tommy later told me. They passed around snacks and water, then introduced themselves to one another, sharing their real names for the first time and explaining their reasons for undertaking such a perilous journey: All were prodemocracy activists looking for safety on the island of Taiwan. Their bid for freedom, however, would soon draw in the United States.

Hours earlier, one of Tommy’s green Vans sneakers had sailed over the side of the boat and into the water. No one had considered stopping to retrieve it. Now, in spontaneous, rowdy celebration of their nearly completed escape, the group peed on the remaining shoe, then kicked it overboard—a memory that Tommy would laugh about later.

Their plan had been fairly simple: If they made it this far, they would turn off their engines, and call a contact in Taiwan who would alert the coast guard to their presence. When the authorities arrived, they would claim they had run out of fuel on a fishing trip and needed to be towed to shore. Only once on land would they divulge their true stories. Tommy gazed upward as they waited for the coast guard to arrive. The light pollution radiating from Hong Kong normally obscured his view of the stars. But here, in the open water, he could see the whole sky.

When the Taiwanese coast guard appeared, the five men waved flashlights to attract attention. Their plan fell apart almost as soon as the authorities reached their boat. The coast guard had extra fuel on hand, and initially offered to simply transfer it over, then send the wayward boat on its way. As the coast guard crew spoke to the young men, however, they grew suspicious. What were the five doing in the area? Why were they carrying so few supplies and traveling in an unmarked boat? “They knew that we weren’t just out fishing,” Tommy told me.

The young men fessed up, telling the sailors their real intentions. They had been among huge crowds of people who since the spring of 2019 had taken to the streets to call for democracy in Hong Kong. Now they feared for their safety as Beijing not only stamped out the protests, but moved to decimate all dissent in the city. The Taiwanese coast guard brought the group ashore where they were questioned by military officials. The next day, they were moved again by ship. Tommy slept on and off. He wasn’t sure where they were heading.

Eventually, he and the others were deposited in rooms that reminded him of the dorms at his university back in Hong Kong. They had no computers and no internet access. Government officials—Tommy isn’t sure who they were—came and went, asking more questions. Eventually, the five men were allowed to watch TV and read articles from Apple Daily, the now-defunct prodemocracy newspaper. As their confinement stretched into months, Tommy, who had been an arts student before he abandoned his studies, sketched to pass the time.

Some of the young men wanted to stay in Taiwan, but others hoped to resettle elsewhere. They were given English lessons by a tutor. The materials, for reasons none of them understood, covered the history and geography of Boston, and how to navigate the city on public transportation. To mark New Year’s Eve, Tommy shaved off his long hair. He wanted a symbolic new start. Two weeks later—about six months after he’d fled Hong Kong—the journey to freedom that started on a small boat would end on a commercial flight that touched down in the United States.

Hong Kong was long a magnet for people seeking opportunity and running from persecution. Residents of mainland China fleeing the violence and political purges of the Cultural Revolution swam toward the city’s lights—Tommy’s grandmother among them. In the late 1970s, thousands packed into ships, many of which were cramped wooden fishing boats, to escape to Hong Kong from Vietnam as that country’s war ended. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, student activists from China snuck into Hong Kong.

Now the fleeing has reversed, as Beijing’s crusade to strip Hong Kong of its defining freedoms has created a wave of exiles. “It is still beautiful,” Kwok Ka-ki, a former prodemocracy lawmaker, told me of the city, “but underneath, everything has changed.” Soon after we spoke, he was arrested, and now faces charges under a draconian national-security law imposed in 2020, an effort to extinguish any form of political opposition wholesale.

At Hong Kong’s airport—even as it is crippled by stringent COVID regulations—crowds gather nightly to board flights abroad, aiming to join the tens of thousands who have already left. Among them are parents worried about the city’s more nationalistic curriculum, activists escaping the ever-shrinking space for dissent, and former prodemocracy legislators who have seen their colleagues locked up.

Over the course of several years living in and covering Hong Kong, I have met countless such exiles. Some want nothing more than anonymity in their new countries, hoping to put the movement behind them. Others remain deeply involved in activism from abroad, setting up organizations and creating online initiatives. They share an acute feeling of isolation and sadness, unmoored from a place they once believed they could help save.

Three in particular are fleeing almost certain jail time after joining in prodemocracy demonstrations and agitation, their stories highlighting the gulf between Hong Kong’s promise and its reality today. They either escaped aboard a tiny boat, ultimately crossing a vast distance, or tested U.S. border policy by illegally slipping into America on land. One later spent months walking from New York to Florida on foot to raise awareness of Hong Kong’s plight. “You think this is crazy?” Tommy said to me when I marveled at the riskiness of his trip. “Imagine how I feel.”

The exiles—all of whom, like Tommy, asked to be identified by nicknames to avoid retribution from Beijing and pro-China groups—are each grappling with their newfound freedom in different ways, at times clashing with other members of the Hong Kong diaspora over how best to help their home city, and wrestling with guilt for those left behind. They have put their fate in the hands of the U.S., a country they still see as a beacon in their fight against China.

Almost as soon as Tommy and his fellow travelers were escorted ashore in Taiwan, officials there began working to resolve the geopolitical dilemma the group had inadvertently set off. Beijing had baselessly accused the U.S. and Taiwan of fomenting the Hong Kong protests, so a public announcement about the five could further inflame tensions. Taiwan—which lives under Beijing’s constant threat of forceful reunification with mainland China—sought American help. The State Department worked with a Hong Kong lobbyist in Washington, D.C., to begin planning the group’s transfer to U.S. soil.

In January 2021, the men boarded a flight from Taipei to New York City. Through all those months in limbo in Taiwan, Tommy had been unable to directly contact his family. He had rehearsed cracking a joke to tell them he was fine, but when he landed in the U.S. and finally spoke to them on the phone, he broke down crying.

Adams Carvalho

On the surface, Tommy and Ray have a lot in common. Both have family members who fled mainland China for the relative safety of Hong Kong (albeit decades apart), and both grew up on tales of Chinese Communist Party abuse. And though the men’s paths did not cross in Hong Kong, they were both active participants in the city’s protest movement. Tommy had been among those who broke into the Legislative Council building; Ray was one of the students who occupied a university campus in a days-long siege.

But the two are also very different. Tommy is a wiry, bespectacled 24-year-old, whereas Ray, 20, is stocky and gregarious, a bit of a smartass. Tommy was riven with fear and uncertainty during the months it took him to plan his escape from Hong Kong; Ray seemed to me to be totally unbothered by the risks he had taken.

Ray fled Hong Kong aboard a plane bound for London in August 2020. After arriving and looking up Britain’s asylum-acceptance rates, he turned his sights to the United States. But the Trump administration had banned flights from Europe as part of efforts to curtail the coronavirus pandemic, so after a few months in Britain, and some scheming with an eccentric Chinese activist and immigration lawyer he connected with on Twitter, he boarded another flight, this one bound for Mexico. He would cross into the U.S. on foot.

Ray first attempted the crossing soon after arriving, in January 2021. He walked for hours after being dropped near a crossing point by a smuggler. It was frigid and windy. To avoid detection, he trekked in complete darkness. But no one stopped him, and eventually he arrived at a gas station in Southern California, where a contact met him. He fell asleep during the car ride north and awoke only when the driver announced, “Welcome to L.A.”

From there, he initiated an asylum claim, which likely would have inched through the bureaucracy were it not for Ray’s own impatience. Holed up in an Airbnb east of Los Angeles, he killed time watching cable news. He was particularly infatuated with debates over immigration. On one show, liberal-leaning politicians claimed the American system was so dysfunctional that migrants detained after attempting to enter the U.S. would likely be granted asylum faster than those who arrived without incident. Hearing this, Ray devised a new plan.

In early February, he headed back to the border, walked into Mexico, and then, after a few days, tried crossing into the U.S. again. This time, he hiked across a stretch of hills outside Mexicali and used a flashlight to catch the attention of a group of border guards. When they got ahold of him, he explained his situation in English, hoping to find a compassionate audience. Instead, the oldest-looking of the three turned him around, menacingly warned him not to try crossing again, and watched as Ray trudged into Mexico. Again.

Undeterred, Ray waited a few days and revised his tactics. He took a new route and this time, after flagging down some border guards, pretended not to understand English, speaking to them in Cantonese, the dominant language of Hong Kong. Carrying only his mobile phone and a few other possessions, he feigned ignorance—and had to stifle a laugh—when one of the agents said, “I caught a ninja!” The border guards finally resorted to using a translation app to pepper him with questions.

Authorities took him to a detention center where he was held for eight days with about 20 other men. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in San Diego where he was soon transferred was far better. After interviews with U.S. officials, he walked out of Otay Mesa Detention Center in mid-April 2021. The asylum process typically takes from six months up to several years, according to the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group. It took Ray just 63 days.

Since the start of the 2019 protests, the U.S. has consistently called for China to preserve Hong Kong’s independent press, judiciary, and rule of law. Time and again, American officials and politicians have criticized Beijing for its crackdown. Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in 2019, which put the city’s special trading privileges with the U.S. under greater scrutiny, and compelled the U.S. to level sanctions against Hong Kong officials responsible for human-rights abuses. If these measures were designed to curtail China’s actions, however, they failed. Beijing has brushed them off as little more than a nuisance.

Stories such as Tommy’s and Ray’s suggest the U.S. is fulfilling its obligation to Hong Kong’s prodemocracy movement. The means they took to get to the U.S., though, were drastic and almost impossible to replicate. A truer test of American mettle is the countless others like them who remain in limbo, victims of a broken and deeply politicized American immigration system. These people stood up to Beijing’s authoritarian might and, knowing they would likely lose, fought for their freedoms anyway. Yet U.S. lawmakers from both parties who once cheered them seem to have largely moved on.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act passed the House of Representatives by a 417–1 vote in November 2019, but the bipartisanship was fleeting. At the time, few were more eager to bash China than Senator Ted Cruz, who flew to Hong Kong at the height of the protests and dressed in all black out of “solidarity” with the demonstrators. The marches were “inspiring,” Cruz said then. About a year after he proclaimed Hong Kong to be the “new Berlin,” however, he showed the limits of his support. In December 2020, he killed a bill that included provisions for temporary protected status for Hong Kongers and expedited certain refugee and asylum applications. It had previously passed in the House.

A few months before Cruz shot down the bill, saying it was a ploy by Democrats who support “open borders” to make “all immigration legal,” a group of Hong Kongers, among them an American citizen, sought protection in the city’s U.S. Consulate but were turned away. One was arrested by the Hong Kong authorities and sentenced to three years and seven months in jail.

Last August, the Biden administration made a small concession, blocking the enforced removal of many Hong Kong residents from the U.S. for a period of 18 months. The White House said in a memo that “offering safe haven for Hong Kong residents who have been deprived of their guaranteed freedoms in Hong Kong furthers United States interests in the region.” Getting in, however, remains a challenge.

Adams Carvalho

Kenny, a 27-year-old former civil engineer, took the same route as Tommy to flee Hong Kong; he was on the same boat. But while Tommy soon decided that he liked New York, Kenny felt restless.

Kenny had stayed fervently involved in the Hong Kong prodemocracy movement when he was resettled, initially in Arlington, Virginia. He joined protests and tried to spread his message on social media. But he wanted to do more, and staying planted in Arlington while trying to sound the alarm seemed ineffective. So he settled on the most American of pastimes, a road trip—but without that most American of possessions, a car. His first walk was a 10-day trek from the White House to New York City. He hoped that by speaking to ordinary Americans, he could raise awareness of the crackdown under way in his home city. A few months later, Kenny set off on an even more ambitious route, from the Pentagon all the way to Miami. In all, he estimated, he would walk more than 1,000 miles.

Kenny documented his movements on Instagram, posting videos and photos of the people he encountered and the places he passed through. He snapped pictures fit for a tourism ad for rural America: rolling cornfields, Amish families standing near their horse-drawn buggies, red-painted barns. He embarked on his walk with his face completely covered by a reflective sunglass shield that looked like it was borrowed from the prop closet on a cyberpunk film set, and a thin flag pole jutting from his backpack adorned with two black banners that read Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times, one in Chinese and another in English.

His unusual appearance attracted attention, not all of it welcoming. In Maryland, someone called the police on him as he knocked on doors looking for bandages. On the eighth day of his walk to Miami, a stranger pulled a gun on him as he tried to hide near the man’s garage during a rainstorm.

As he moved farther south, Kenny found people to be more accommodating, which he’d expected, and more informed about the prodemocracy movement, which he hadn’t. Often, though, he was downbeat, discovering that many Americans had the luxury of not knowing or caring what was happening on the other side of the world.

He felt more optimistic when a worker at a sports bar in Moncure, North Carolina, told him he had followed the news about Hong Kong, and gave Kenny slices of pizza and an orange soda. In Glynn County, in southeastern Georgia, Kenny spent the night with firefighters who let him sleep in the firehouse. In Florida in mid-October, a woman invited him to sleep at her house. He stayed for three days, met her family, and joined them on a trip to a park where he spotted a manatee in the water. He documented the sighting with an Instagram post punctuated by a string of exclamation points. In all, the walk lasted 66 days.

As he navigated America’s roadways, a court case about him in Hong Kong carried on. Kenny had been among a group of demonstrators who, rallying against a government decision to ban face masks at marches, had assaulted a police officer after the officer grabbed a protester. Video of the skirmish, filmed by a passenger on a nearby bus, was picked up by international news outlets. Kenny was arrested but released on bail, which is when he began trying to escape Hong Kong by boat, eventually succeeding on his fifth or sixth try. (Earlier failed efforts cost him a small fortune.)

Days after his outing to the park in Florida, sentences were handed down against two of Kenny’s co-defendants. One was given seven years in jail, the other sent to a rehabilitation center. Kenny told me he had no regrets about fleeing, that he wanted to look forward. “This is why I decided to walk—because I don’t want to think back or live in a constant state of regret,” he said. He later admitted that he did at times feel guilt about leaving, but he tried to bury it, preferring to focus on forward action. “I’m thinking: What can I do on their behalf?” he said. “This is my purpose.”

In some—extremely limited—respects, he has succeeded, telling individual Americans about a fight for freedom half a world away that many of them are unaware of. I spoke with one of the people who met Kenny on his walking tour, Nicholas Kiernan, who said he had initially driven past Kenny in Northern Virginia in late August while on his way to work. Kenny’s peculiar appearance caught Kiernan’s attention. He resembled “a Google mapping device,” Kiernan told me. “He looked wild.” About a half hour later, Kiernan, a land surveyor, was still thinking about the odd character from his morning commute when Kenny stumbled onto Kiernan’s worksite. Intrigued, Kiernan hopped out of his truck to ask Kenny what he was up to.

Kenny showed him photos of the Hong Kong protests, explaining to Kiernan, who knew nothing about what was happening there, about how police had cracked down on demonstrators. “It was thought-provoking stuff,” Kiernan recounted. But perhaps more than anything, Kiernan said he was impressed by Kenny’s courage—sleeping in a tent and carrying a heavy backpack for miles at a time, speaking to total strangers in a foreign language in a new country. “It takes heart to be able to do something like that.”

Additional reporting by Karina Tsui.