After a dozen years behind bars in China, Houston native Mark Swidan says the hardest part of his ordeal has not been surviving prison, it has been starting over. Now back in a modest west Houston apartment, he is working through piles of paperwork, long delays and the emotional strain of rebuilding a life that effectively stalled in 2012, according to ABC13 Houston.
In an interview with ABC13 Houston, Swidan described how guards burst into his hotel room during a 2012 business trip, forced him face-down and pushed written confessions in Chinese that he could not read in front of him. He told the station that he asked again and again for consular access and for a lawyer and said those requests were denied, and that long stretches in detention left him weak and disoriented.
How He Was Detained and Freed
Reporting at the time shows that Swidan was arrested in 2012 and later convicted on drug-related charges; after years of delayed rulings, a Chinese court handed him a suspended death sentence. Reuters reported that he was flown back to the United States in late November 2024 alongside two other men as part of a diplomatic exchange.
Coming Home Wasn’t Simple
One year after he touched down at Joint Base San Antonio, Swidan says the practical work of rebuilding has been grueling. In the ABC13 Houston interview he described losing more than 100 pounds in custody, moving into a small two-bedroom apartment and colliding with the bureaucracy of starting over: no driver’s license, no credit history and what he called “no real identity.” His mother, Katherine Swidan, told the station she sold nearly everything to pay for his legal defense, which the family estimates cost close to $1 million.
Family Fight and a U.N. Finding
Katherine Swidan spent years pressing lawmakers, diplomats and human-rights advocates to keep her son’s case in view, and congressional records show she repeatedly urged officials to act. Filings and Congress.gov documents lay out the family’s outreach. The U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also issued an opinion concluding that Swidan’s pretrial detention and lengthy delays lacked legal basis, a finding human-rights groups cited in calls for his release (U.N. Digital Library).
Diplomatic Swap and Official Response…