Your workflow would be much better served by using Lightroom Classic than Lightroom CC. I then download the keepers to my disk in a new folder at full resolution, and delete the original folder which contains all the rejected images. You can also click at the upper-right corner to view the upload progress. A blue upload progress bar appears at the top of the screen. In the dialog box that appears, browse to the folder path and select one or more photos that you want to add. I then delete all the rejected photos so I have my keepers. Click (below Lr icon) at the upper-left corner of the screen. I add all the photos to Lightroom CC and do my normal 'reject photos' process.

There is no link with the files that you imported from originally. After a while, and only when you have reached the local storage limit set inside the program it will delete the local copies in the temporary storage but the original files that you imported from are never deleted by Lightroom no matter what you do in the program. When you use Lightroom CC instead of Classic, when you import/add images, they get copied to a temporary space on your hard disk. So in essense, I don't think you can delete them off your disk through Lightroom CC. So, when you 'delete' the photos, it's deleting them from the cloud, not your computer.

It doesn't simply reference a file on your computer like Lightroom Classic CC. Looks like when you 'add' photos to Lightroom CC, they're automatically uploaded to the cloud at full resolution. I might have found the answer (after several hours of searching).

Adobe lightroom online