Bhutanese Refugees In Limbo After ICE Crackdown

On March 19, Nina (name changed) was at work when her father called with the bad news that ICE was going to deport her brother. Nina came with her parents and seven siblings to the United States in 2008 as refugees when she was just ten years old. It took this Nepalese family more than 15 years to rebuild their lives in their adopted homeland. Now, her brother’s imminent deportation is resurfacing the scars of statelessness and displacement.

Nina and her family belong to the estimated 100,000 strong Nepali-speaking Bhutanese living in the United States. Most of them came to the country between 2008 and 2017 as refugees. Before that, this predominantly Hindu community was living in refugee camps in Nepal after being systematically persecuted and driven out of their original homeland, Bhutan, in the preceding decades. 

Now, under the Trump administration’s recent deportation drive, the community is anxious about being driven away again, this time to Bhutan, the very country they had to flee. 

ICE Targets Bhutanese-American Community

Since March, ICE officials have detained at least 60 Bhutanese refugees living in the U.S. At least 13 have been deported back to Bhutan, according to Asian Refugees United (ARU), a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of Asian refugees in the U.S. 

Community leaders and the ARU are scrambling to collect and verify information about these individuals, who were based in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, New York, and Idaho. 

ARU also serves as the liaison for the detained and deported individuals, connecting them or their families with legal help through the Asian Law Caucus (ALC). Robin Gurung, co-founder of the ARU, says that in many of the cases, the refugees did not have proper legal representation when they were taken into ICE custody. 

Gurung is a Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugee who came to the United States in 2012. He co-founded the ARU in 2016. He lives in the Greater Harrisburg Area in Pennsylvania, which is home to around 40,000 Bhutanese refugees like him. Gurung believes that the community lacks the knowledge and resources that will prepare them to understand the American legal system and access legal services. 

“When they were detained and then prepared for deportation, were they aware of what’s happening? I would assume not all of them were aware,” he said.

ICE has released details of some of the individuals detained, stating that they already had removal orders issued by judges after sentencing in previous criminal cases. Guilty convictions in some criminal proceedings can lead to the revocation of an immigrant’s green card status and the judge issuing removal orders.

But community leaders such as Bhuwan Pyakurel, Councilmember for the City of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, question the rationale of sending refugees back to the country where they were persecuted.

“We were refugees and we came to this country legally. Yes, these people, they might have done something wrong,” he said, “but they need to be punished by the law of this country.”

He said that many of the families he has spoken to revealed that they never understood the full implications of pleading guilty in court and in many cases did not even know that removal orders had been issued against them. 

“Because we come from refugee camps, where laws and legal systems are virtually non-existent,” he said. “So there is this understanding that maybe if we plead guilty and pay a fine, you will be released, or some such understanding.”

Need for accountability from ICE

Gurung raised questions about whether ICE followed due process when apprehending individuals from their homes, workplaces, and court appearances across the country.

“We don’t know if they had a warrant, we don’t know if it was signed by the judge,” he said. “None of the family members that I talked to have final removal orders, either in writing or by phone call.”

Crucially, individuals can appeal their removal orders within 90 days of issuance, but many of the detainees did not exercise this right because they did not have access to proper legal counsel. 

Even then, there might have been some recourse had legal counsel been available at the time of detention, but the detainees were shuttled from one detention center to another, making it difficult for the ALC to assist with legal services.

“What has been troubling is the rapid nature of this sort of arrest to detention to deportation pipeline,” said Aisa Villarosa, an attorney and Manager of the Asian American Leaders Table at the ALC. “In at least one instance, if this person had just a bit more time before they were deported, there were definitely grounds to reopen their case.”

Villarosa shared Gurung’s concerns about ICE’s lack of accountability and about due process during arrests. 

In one case, ICE officials arrived at a family residence early in the morning to arrest an individual. They banged on the door and subjected the family – including the children – to aggressive questioning before realizing they were in the wrong house. 

Villarosa and her team have not seen a single ICE warrant from the detained families or been able to verify whether they were signed by a judge. She believes that ICE releasing details of the criminal records of certain detainees is a way of villainizing the individuals without offering any real accountability. 

“We have big questions on the minimal due process that should have been afforded in multiple situations,” she said. “The patterns we’re seeing are alarming.”

“A Second Chance”

Many of the detainees’ removal orders were issued for infractions that took place years ago. For instance, in 2017, Nina’s brother pleaded guilty to aggravated assault at the direction of his lawyer, who advised that a guilty plea would shorten the sentence, but did not explain the consequences of a conviction on his green card status. 

Her brother served a reduced sentence for his crime, but authorities revoked his green card status and initiated proceedings to deport him, even detaining him for a year and a half at the Tacoma Detention Facility in Washington. 

After spending a combined three years in prison and the detention facility, Nina’s brother was free to return home in 2019. In the five years since, Nina believes her brother has done everything he could to turn his life around. 

“He has done all of the rehabilitation, he has completed his probation, he has completed his jail time. He has done anger management classes, therapy, you name it, and he’s done it,” she said. 

Her brother even started his own business in his Idaho hometown. A divorcee with a 24-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, he has since remarried and has a five-month-old infant from his second marriage. 

Unexpectedly, on March 19, 2025, an ICE officer called to say he would be deported the following week. 

Nina’s brother is now back in the Tacoma Detention Center in Washington, five years after he thought he had left the place for good. He is unsure about his future, while his family seeks legal counsel on the outside, fighting what appears to be a losing battle to halt his deportation. 

“What’s the point of the rehabilitation programs? What’s the point of making them do all these classes?” asks Nina, in tears as she recounts her family’s dilemma. “It’s not easy to build from zero, and then now you’re putting him at zero again… these people deserve a second chance!”

A History of Persecution

Much of the community’s anxieties about being deported stem from the history of persecution in Bhutan, their home country. 

Ethnic Nepalis, a primarily Hindu group, migrated in waves from Nepal to Bhutan since the 19th century and settled in the southern parts of the country. The country’s Buddhist majority groups – the Ngalop and Sharchop – populated the rest of the kingdom.

In the late 1980s, the Government of Bhutan – led by Ngalop monarchs – introduced several ethnic laws under the umbrella policy of ‘One Nation, One People.’

“It’s like saying, if you want to belong to this country, you have to be like us in terms of language, in terms of culture, in terms of practices,” said Narayan Sharma, a Pennsylvania-based legal expert who is Nepali-Bhutanese. When he lived in Nepal’s refugee camp, he taught law in Nepal, and has earned a master’s degree and a JD since he moved to the U.S. in 2011. 

These laws, he explained, specifically targeted Nepali-speaking Hindus. Schools stopped teaching the Nepali language, Nepali books were burned, and the Nepalese community was forced to adopt the traditional Bhutanese attire worn by the Ngalops.

The government also introduced a census exercise employed mostly in the southern region of the country where ethnic Nepalis lived. According to Sharma, the survey arbitrarily classified some Nepalis as immigrants and not citizens. 

Amid mass arrests, incarcerations without fair trials, and instances of torture, the government introduced a new policy of voluntary migration.

“The government made people sign forms in their language [Dzongkha], so that Nepali-speaking didn’t understand what was written,” said Sharma. “They then offered very paltry sums for their land and property… and pushed Nepali-speaking people into India by the thousands.”

The Indian government refused to accept these Bhutanese refugees who then moved northwards through India towards their ancestral homeland of Nepal where they settled in refugee camps.

By 1996, the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal numbered around 80,000, rising to 108,000 by 2007. In the interim, multiple talks between the governments of Nepal and Bhutan failed to find a solution to repatriate the refugees. 

In 2007, the United States and seven Western countries, including Canada and Australia, agreed to resettle the community, with the majority – nearly 85,000 – settling in the United States by 2015. Some stayed back in Nepali refugee camps, and are still there, hoping for repatriation to Bhutan someday.

Among those who moved to the United States, refugees like Sharma became naturalized citizens, while others are green card-holders – many who may be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s recent deportation orders. 

Sharma points out that the United States is party to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, an international human right treaty that prohibits member nations to transport individuals to countries where they might suffer torture, or cruel or inhuman punishment.

“Our link is only with the U.S., because we do not have a country of origin that readily accepts us,” said Sharma. “In this battle of expulsion and rejection, there are human beings at the other end who are humiliated, who are hungry, who will become stateless.”

Deportees In Limbo 

Bhutan’s stance towards the ethnic Nepalis appears unchanged. The ARU and ALC confirm that at least 12 individuals were deported to Bhutan but have only been able to verify the whereabouts of four people who are not in Bhutan but in police custody in Nepal. 

Dr. Gopal Krishna Siwakoti, a Nepali activist who has worked extensively in human rights, refugee rights, transitional justice, and disaster displacement, serves as the President of the Institute for Human Rights, Environment and Development (INHURED International), a human rights organization based in Nepal. 

He travelled from the capital Kathmandu to Kakarbhitta, a small town on the Nepal side of the India-Nepal border, where the four deportees were being held to invstigate. 

Three of them said they were among ten deportees sent to New Delhi on a commercial plane accompanied by ICE agents. From New Delhi, they boarded a flight to the Bhutanese capital Paro, where officials housed them at a hotel and offered them meals. 

Then, each deportee was placed in a separate room and questioned individually. 

“They were told that their parents had already left the country; they were asked if they knew the official language Dzongkha, if they knew anyone else in the country – so the authorities lay down the prerequisites, or the conditions for staying back in Bhutan,” said Siwakoti. “Then, they were told that this [Bhutan] was not their country.”

The deportees were coerced into saying they did not want to remain in Bhutan. Then, the Bhutanese officials transferred them to Phuentsholing on the Bhutanese side of the India-Bhutan border. 

The Bhutanese officials arranged for taxis to take the deportees through India to the Nepal border at Panitanki in West Bengal. With the help of agents, they entered Nepal illegally and went to the Beldangi Bhutanese refugee camp in Jhapa. 

They were caught and taken into custody by local police, along with another deportee who was apprehended crossing the border into India. Another deportee said that at least two groups of refugees were deported from the United States. 

The whereabouts of the remaining eight deportees are still unknown, but they are likely hiding in India or Nepal.

“Everyone is in a dilemma. The local officials in Nepal, they don’t know what to do with them,” said Siwakoti. “The immigration officials are asking what is going to happen now because there are more people in the pipeline who will follow the same road, the same route.”

“They’re totally in limbo.” 

Anxiety in the Bhutanese Community

News of the ICE arrests and the deportations has led to widespread anxiety and panic among the Bhutanese community in the United States, said Villarosa “With each ICE targeting, detention and now deportation, it feels like a community wound. There’s so much fear.”

At the ARU, Gurung is trying to match the families of the detained with legal counsel with the help of the Asian Law Caucus. They are collecting as much information as they can about ICE’s actions to hold them accountable for their actions: “We are looking at federal litigation, if we have to go to court,” he said. 

In Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Councilmember Pyakurel is inundated with requests for help from his community, anxious about whether they are next on the deportation block. “I am getting emails from people in the community from my town and also neighboring towns, and they’re asking me things that I don’t have answers to,” he said. 

He is trying to advocate for his community by reaching out to the wider Bhutanese and Hindu diaspora and believes that India could play a decisive role in determining the future of the refugees given the country’s political and diplomatic heft in the region. 

“The Indian government, they kind of represent Hindus across the globe,” said Pyakurel. “We are Hindus. We were both out of a country because of our Hindu faith and Hindu Dharma.” 

Members of the Indian diaspora have started an online petition to appeal to the Indian government to help the deported refugees, and leverage its diplomatic influence to advocate for Bhutanese refugees.

For Nina and her family, the agonizing waiting game continues. Her parents live with her temporarily, and the family is fearful for her brother and anxious about their future in the country.

“Bhutan is repeating everything they did back in the 90s,” she said about her parents. “From Bhutan to Nepal, they were kicked out, and that was horrible.”

“Then they came here, and were feeling safe… and from here, they’re being kicked out again.”