In early 2023, several years after the winding down of the campaign of mass internment that ran from 2017 to 2019, local authorities in the Uyghur heartland of China’s Xinjiang region received a chilling order. Similar to the mass internment drive that began in 2017, they were instructed to meet strict quotas for the detention of Uyghur residents, but this time for short-term detention. To hit these targets, grassroots officials combed through the preceding decade of residents’ lives, hunting