Beginning in March 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained and removed dozens of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees who had been legally resettled in the United States from 2008 onward. Bhutan declined to accept most of them and routed them to the Indian border; the Asian Law Caucus filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in December 2025 seeking records.
From early March 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began detaining and removing Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees who had been legally resettled in the United States from 2008 onward as part of the third-country resettlement programme that emptied the camps in eastern Nepal. By July 2025, more than 50 such refugees had been deported, according to the Asian Law Caucus, with cases concentrated in Pennsylvania, New York and several other states. The deportees were typically refugees with old criminal convictions whose lawful permanent resident status had been revoked or whose naturalisation had been challenged.
The cases produced a near-immediate diplomatic and humanitarian problem. Bhutan does not formally recognise the deportees as citizens, having stripped most Lhotshampa of citizenship in the early 1990s, and on arrival the first groups were briefly held by Bhutanese authorities and then bussed to the Indian border, where they were left without onward documentation. NPR, CNN, The Diplomat and the Kathmandu Post have covered specific cases between April 2025 and December 2025; the Asian Law Caucus filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the Northern District of California on 4 December 2025 seeking records of the policy and operational basis for the removals.
This article sets out the documented scope of the cases, the legal architecture, the named individuals reported in the press, the response from advocacy organisations and the United States and Bhutanese governments, and the open questions about statelessness and onward placement. It applies a strict attribution standard to all named individuals.
Scope
According to Spectrum News Rochester, more than 40 Bhutanese refugees in the Rochester area were detained by ICE during March 2025. According to the Pittsburgh Capital-Star and WITF in Harrisburg, 12 Bhutanese refugees in Pennsylvania were arrested by ICE in March, of whom at least four had been deported by 28 March 2025 according to The Philadelphia Inquirer and WESA. WITF reported on 24 April 2025 that ICE had confirmed additional deportations from Pennsylvania.
By July 2025, the Asian Law Caucus reported that more than 50 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees had been removed nationwide, alongside more than 400 Southeast Asian refugees from broader regional cohorts. CNN on 18 July 2025 reported "more than two dozen" specifically returned to Bhutan and then routed onward to India.
Legal architecture
Most deportees arrived in the United States between 2008 and 2015 as UNHCR-referred refugees, gained Lawful Permanent Resident status after a year, and in many cases naturalised after five. The removal pathway, where it has been documented, generally proceeded along one of two routes:
- Removal of LPRs with criminal convictions: under the Immigration and Nationality Act, certain criminal convictions (including some classified as aggravated felonies for immigration purposes) trigger mandatory removal proceedings against lawful permanent residents. Multiple reported cases involve convictions from many years earlier, sometimes pleaded out without the defendant understanding the immigration consequences.
- Denaturalisation review: in a smaller subset, the US government has challenged naturalised citizenship on the basis of disputed disclosures during the naturalisation interview, opening a path to subsequent removal.
The Asian Law Caucus argues, in its 4 December 2025 FOIA lawsuit, that the operational details of these removals — including any government-to-government understanding with Bhutan — have not been disclosed. The lawsuit, filed jointly with Asian Refugees United and Nossaman LLP in the Northern District of California, seeks records from DHS, ICE, the Department of State and other agencies under the Freedom of Information Act.
Named cases
The following individuals have been named in the press; this article reports them only where they have been identified by published reporting and in the context of attributed sources.
- Bidur Khadka, of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Identified by WITF and Lancaster Online as one of four men deported from Pennsylvania by 28 March 2025. According to WITF, his removal order dated to August 2023, although his family said they had not been aware of it before WITF shared the records.
- Mohan Karki. According to NPR on 11 December 2025, Karki was born in a refugee camp in Nepal after his family was driven from Bhutan in the 1990s; he moved to the United States in 2011. According to NPR's reporting, Karki was arrested at age 17 in Georgia for a burglary incident, pleaded guilty, and is reported to have been told by his then-attorneys that the conviction would not affect his green card. NPR reported in December 2025 that a federal judge in Michigan had rejected his petition to be released from detention. Karki's attorneys argue he is at serious risk of statelessness if returned to Bhutan.
Other deportees and detainees referenced in the press have not been named publicly, in some cases because families requested anonymity through their attorneys.
Response of advocacy organisations
The principal legal-advocacy response has come from the Asian Law Caucus, working with Asian Refugees United. Aisa Villarosa, an attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, told the Kathmandu Post in April 2025 that families had been verbally told by ICE officers that the government of Bhutan would receive the deportees, and that "the opposite is occurring".
The Asian Law Caucus filed a FOIA request on 26 June 2025 seeking records on policies, communications and data related to the detention and deportation of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees. When the records were not produced, the organisation filed the underlying FOIA lawsuit on 4 December 2025 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, with United Stateless joining as a plaintiff.
In Pennsylvania, Dauphin County commissioner Justin Douglas issued a public call on 2 April 2025 for ICE to pause the deportations. Local immigration counsel including Mohamed Immigration Law in Rochester have provided pro bono representation in detention proceedings.
The Bhutanese and Nepali response
Reporting from the Kathmandu Post, Setopati and NPR describes a consistent pattern after arrival in Bhutan: deportees are briefly received by Bhutanese authorities, transported across Bhutan to the Indian border (often in the Phuentsholing or Gelephu corridors), and instructed not to return. Indian authorities then funnelled at least some of them onward into Nepal, although Nepal, which had hosted the Lhotshampa refugees in camps in Jhapa and Morang from 1991, has not formally accepted the deportees as its citizens or as repatriated refugees.
Bhutanese refugee organisations including the Bhutanese Refugee Repatriation and Justice Coalition issued statements in April 2025 condemning Bhutan's handling of the cases. The Kathmandu Post reported on 17 April 2025 that the Supreme Court of Nepal had stayed the deportation of four Bhutanese refugees by Nepal to a third destination pending further review.
Statelessness
The substantive humanitarian concern is statelessness. The 1985 Citizenship Act of Bhutan and the 1988 census process resulted in the formal denial of citizenship to a large share of the Lhotshampa population. The deportees from 2025 are the cohort that the United States resettled precisely on the basis of UNHCR-verified statelessness or refugee status. Returning them to Bhutan, as the Diplomat's April 2025 reporting framed it, returns them to the country of origin that does not consider them citizens, with no onward documentation to a country that will.
The Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford published an analysis in 2025 of the deportation-and-statelessness pattern, framing it as a test case for the obligations of resettlement countries under the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons.
Open questions
- The basis of Bhutanese acceptance. ICE's reported position, according to the Asian Law Caucus, is that the Bhutanese government had agreed to receive the deportees. The reported pattern of brief acceptance followed by border expulsion suggests at minimum a divergence between the agreement as understood by US authorities and the implementation by Bhutanese authorities.
- The total number of deportees. Reporting between March and December 2025 produced figures ranging from "more than two dozen" to "more than 50". The FOIA lawsuit aims to clarify the operational total.
- Onward placement. Whether deportees ultimately settle, are detained, or remain undocumented in India or Nepal is not consistently reported.
- The legal status of remaining cases. Multiple detainees were still in ICE custody as of December 2025 reporting; the Mohan Karki case remained pending after the Michigan federal-court ruling.
References
- Bhutanese refugees deported from the US find themselves stateless once more — The Diplomat (April 2025)
- This refugee's family faced persecution in Bhutan. Now, he could be deported there — NPR (11 December 2025)
- A refugee deported to Bhutan by the US finds himself stranded and stateless — NPR (16 July 2025)
- Forced from Bhutan, deported by the US — CNN (18 July 2025)
- Asian Law Caucus FOIA request — Asian Law Caucus (26 June 2025)
- Asian Law Caucus FOIA lawsuit against DHS and State Department (4 December 2025)
- ICE confirms additional deportations of refugees to Bhutan — WITF (24 April 2025)
- US deports four Pennsylvania Bhutanese refugees — WESA (28 March 2025)
- Deported by US, denied by Bhutan — Kathmandu Post (30 April 2025)
- Dauphin County commissioner calls for ICE to pause deportations — WITF (2 April 2025)
- Deportation from the US: the risks for stateless people — Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
- Bhutanese refugee community fears deportation — Spectrum News Rochester (18 April 2025)
See also
Bhutanese Community Organisations in the United States
Since the large-scale resettlement of Bhutanese refugees beginning in 2007, dozens of community-based organisations have been established across the United States to support the integration, cultural preservation, and civic engagement of the Bhutanese-American community. Major organisations include the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio (BCCO), the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh (BCAP), the Association of Bhutanese in America (ABA), and the Global Bhutanese Hindu Organisation (GBHO), among others.
diaspora·5 min readMental Health in the Bhutanese Refugee Community
The Bhutanese refugee community, both in camps and after resettlement, has experienced disproportionately high rates of mental illness, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and suicide. A landmark 2013 CDC study found a suicide rate of 21.5 per 100,000 among resettled Bhutanese refugees in the United States, nearly twice the national average, prompting targeted public health interventions and community-based mental health programmes.
diaspora·6 min readBhutanese Refugee Entrepreneurs
Bhutanese refugee entrepreneurs have established a growing presence in small business ownership across the United States and other resettlement countries, launching restaurants, grocery stores, trucking companies, beauty salons, and other enterprises that serve both their own communities and the broader public. Concentrated in cities such as Columbus, Ohio, these businesses reflect the economic integration of a resettled population that arrived with limited resources and navigated significant barriers to capital, credit, and market access.
diaspora·7 min readWomen's Experiences in the Bhutanese Refugee Crisis
Women bore a disproportionate burden during the ethnic cleansing of the Lhotshampa from Bhutan and the subsequent decades in refugee camps. Sexual violence by Bhutanese security forces was systematic and documented. In the camps, women faced sexual exploitation, domestic violence, and the collapse of social support structures. Widows and single mothers, many of whom had lost husbands to detention, torture, or killing, became heads of households with minimal resources.
diaspora·7 min readBhutanese Refugee Suicide Crisis
Bhutanese refugees resettled in the United States have experienced suicide rates nearly twice the national average, prompting a CDC investigation, community-led mental health responses, and extensive academic research into the unique stressors facing this displaced population.
diaspora·7 min readCamp Management Committees (Bhutanese Refugee Camps)
Camp Management Committees (CMCs) were elected self-governance bodies in the Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal, serving as intermediaries between the refugee population and international agencies from the early 1990s through the 2010s.
diaspora·7 min read
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