Living in Fear: Bhutanese Hindus Face Statelessness as ICE Targets the Community for Deportation

A wave of deportations targeting Bhutanese refugees with criminal records has sent shockwaves through communities across the United States, particularly in central Pennsylvania where tens of thousands have settled over the past two decades, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

“People started calling us in a panic to let us know ICE arrests have started,” Robin Gurung, co-executive director of Asian Refugees United in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a major hub for Bhutanese refugees in America, was quoted as saying in the Times report.

Since March, immigration authorities have reportedly detained as many as 60 Bhutanese refugees nationwide, with at least two dozen already deported. These individuals, mostly Nepali-speaking Hindus who fled ethnic cleansing in Bhutan during the 1990s, had been legally admitted to the United States through a humanitarian resettlement program initiated under President George W. Bush around 2007.

The deportees face a particularly troubling situation: they are essentially stateless. Though they resided legally in the United States, most had not yet attained full citizenship. More critically, neither Bhutan nor Nepal recognizes them as citizens, the Times reported,

Upon arrival in Bhutan, deportees were reportedly interrogated, had their identification documents confiscated, given approximately $300, and then transported to the Indian border near Nepal, according to Gopal Siwakoti, a human rights activist in Kathmandu tracking the situation.

Some men have taken smuggler routes into Nepal, where about 1,000 Bhutanese still live in refugee camps. At least four have been arrested there. Others remain in hiding or in unknown locations.

“We have not heard from my brother,” said Devi Gurung, whose brother Ashok was deported after serving time for a 2013 aggravated assault conviction in Georgia. “For all we know, he could be dead.”

Lawyers representing the refugees argue their clients were denied proper opportunity to appeal deportation orders.

“The United States is sending people to countries where they have no citizenship, no right to be,” said Craig Shagin, a Harrisburg attorney representing a client identified only as Indra, who was deported despite having a conviction for evading arrest during a DWI stop—an offense that courts have since ruled is not deportable in Pennsylvania.

Living in Fear

The Harrisburg area has become home to approximately 40,000 Bhutanese refugees over two decades. The community has established South Asian groceries, Hindu temples, and restaurants like Mom’s Momo and Deli, which features exhibits about life in refugee camps.

Yet now, even naturalized citizens reportedly carry documentation everywhere to prove their legal status. Many elderly Bhutanese are experiencing re-traumatization as family members disappear.

“This is opening the old wounds again,” Robin Gurung noted. “It is a form of widespread PTSD.”

Historical Context: The Bhutanese Refugee Crisis

The refugees’ story began in the early 1990s when Bhutan, a small Buddhist-majority kingdom between India and Nepal, launched a campaign to forge a single national identity. Many ethnic Nepali residents from southern Bhutan were reclassified as illegal immigrants. The government enforced dress codes and banned teaching Nepali in schools.

Facing violent crackdowns, over 100,000 people—primarily Nepali-speaking Hindus with deeper ancestral ties to Nepal and India than to Bhutan’s Buddhist majority—fled to refugee camps in Nepal. Between 1990-1993, over 100,000 Lhotshampas (approximately one-sixth of Bhutan’s population) were forced to leave or fled Bhutan. They settled in refugee camps in eastern Nepal, where many remained for nearly two decades.

The international community eventually intervened, and starting in 2007, refugees were resettled across several countries, with the United States accepting a significant number. The U.S. accepted the largest number, resettling approximately 95,000 Bhutanese refugees between 2008-2016.

For families like Devi Gurung’s, who fled persecution in Bhutan, spent decades in Nepalese refugee camps, and finally found hope in America, the current situation brings a painful question.

“Bhutan kicked us out,” she said. “We lived over 20 years in Nepal. We couldn’t belong there. We came to the United States with ultimate hope. Now there is fear again.”

She, according to Times report, added a question that haunts many in her community: “Where do we belong?”