ICE confirms additional deportations of refugees to Bhutan

Nepali Supreme Court allows men to go back to refugee camps.

• Jordan Wilkie/WITF
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Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas speaks about Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of six Bhutanese refugees and legal residents in Dauphin and Cumberland counties.

An additional six Bhutanese refugees living in Pennsylvania were deported to Bhutan between April 7 and 14, ICE confirmed on Thursday. The men were sent to Bhutan, despite the fact that they are not considered citizens of the Himalayan nation.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is executing the President’s mission of identifying and removing criminal aliens and other individuals who have violated our nation’s immigration laws,” according to an ICE spokesperson. 

But an attorney for one of the deported men says the U.S. is violating international law regarding the treatment of refugees and prohibitions against making people stateless. 

“It’s absurd in the extreme, but it’s also highly offensive to the law,” said Craig Shagin, an immigration lawyer based in Harrisburg. 

In total, ICE has deported from Pennsylvania 12 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese people who were brought to the U.S. legally through a refugee resettlement program between 2008-2015. Three additional men are still in ICE custody, two with removal orders and one with a pending immigration hearing in June. 

Across the country, at least 24 Bhutanese refugees have been deported since arrests began in early March, according to a combination of ICE records and reports from Bhutanese community leaders. 

“This is how trafficking occurs,” Shagin said. “This is how people get put in places where they have no ability to get out or get help, where they can be exploited by others. For all sorts of reasons, this should not be done.”

Shagin said he is working on litigation against the U.S. government to stop further deportations of Bhutanese refugees, who he said are effectively stateless, since Bhutan doesn’t recognize their citizenship and neither does Nepal, the country that held the refugees for nearly 20 years before they were ultimately resettled in the U.S. and other nations. 

Shagin also said his client was deported despite having a pending appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals, part of the Department of Justice. His request for an emergency stay was denied. 

Shagin claims his client should not have been deported, as the crime he was convicted on was later vacated and dismissed for a constitutional failure to be represented by competent counsel. The crime itself, fleeing or attempting to elude an officer during a traffic stop for driving while intoxicated, is also no longer considered a deportable offense, according to a ruling by the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Pennsylvania. 

ICE, reached late Thursday, did not respond to claims about Shagin’s client or about possible violations of international law by the time of publication. 

Court records show each of the men deported were previously convicted of crimes, from offenses of public drunkenness to felony assault. For those charges, immigration courts have ordered the men removed from the country, as far back as 2017 and as recently as this week. 

WITF is releasing the names of individual detainees only with their families’ permission, or as they become part of the public record. Families of the deported men and local Bhutanese refugee community leaders are worried about the men being targeted for arrest in India or Nepal, given that they are not legal residents of either country upon expulsion from Bhutan. 

There have not been additional arrests in Central Pennsylvania in recent weeks, according to local leader Tilak Niroula, chair of the nonprofit Bhutanese Community Harrisburg. 

Arrests are still occurring in other parts of the country, with an additional three arrests in Ohio this week, according to reports made to Sudarshan Pyakurel, executive director of the Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio.

Going into hiding in Nepal

Four of the first refugees deported to Bhutan on March 27 were ultimately arrested in Nepal and held by immigration officials there. 

The men were flown via commercial flights to New Delhi, India, then on to Bhutan’s only international airport in Paro. Once there, Bhutanese government officials interviewed the deportees, gave them small amounts of cash, and drove them to the border with India. 

In the case of the first wave of deportations, the Bhutanese officials also arranged for the men to be driven across India to Nepal’s border, where they then used the money to pay smugglers to help them cross. 

Bhutan did not provide the men with identification of any kind, nor did the United States, according to reports from an international human rights agency, reports to local Bhutanese leaders and lawyers and reporting by news organizations in Nepal.

Deportees who were not arrested after arriving in India or Nepal have gone into hiding, according to Niroula and other refugee leaders. Some are in Nepal, while others remain in India, all as undocumented migrants. Families of the deported men are worried about whether or not they will be able to meet their loved ones again, Niroula said. 

On Wednesday, Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled that the country could not again deport the men as a violation of international conventions — the same ones Shagin accuses the U.S. of violating. 

Instead, those men will be allowed to return to refugee camps in Nepal, according to a report in NepYork, a publication covering New York’s Nepali-speaking immigrant community. Those are the same camps the men were either born or lived in for two decades after the Bhutanese drove over 100,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese people out of the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

Bhutan stripped those who left of their citizenship, and Nepal did not grant citizenship to the refugees, leading the U.S. and a coalition of other countries to resettle all but 6,000 to 8,000 of them. 

Refugee leaders do not yet know what the Nepali court’s ruling means for the additional people who remain in hiding in Nepal and India, and if they too will be allowed to return to the refugee camps.

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