Trump Wasn’t the First to Deport These Men, and He Won’t Be the Last

For Gopal Dahal, it’s a life of never-ending displacements.

When he was barely 1, his family was forced out of Bhutan, the small Himalayan country where they were a discriminated minority facing ethnic cleansing. After spending over a decade in a refugee camp in neighboring Nepal, Mr. Dahal and his family made their way to Pennsylvania for a new beginning, after the United States initiated a program to resettle tens of thousands of Bhutanese refugees.

But this spring, as part of the crackdown on immigrants by the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents picked him up from his apartment as his aging parents watched. He was detained for weeks based on felonies for which he had already served time in jail, and then deported to the country of his birth, which did not want him.

So began a saga of deportations with no clear end in sight.

Upon his arrival in Bhutan, Mr. Dahal, who belongs to the Lhotshampas ethnic minority in Bhutan, was deported again. Security agents picked him up at the country’s international airport, put him in a car and drove him to the border with Nepal. Then they pushed him across.

Mr. Dahal is now at a refugee camp, effectively stateless. He is hiding out there because Nepal is fining deportees like him for entering the country illegally and preparing documents to deport them again.

“I have no home to stay at, no food to eat and no work to survive,” he said at the refugee camp. “I don’t know how long this will continue.”

Mr. Dahal is one of at least two dozen Bhutanese refugees who had settled in the United States, but who were picked up and deported to a life of uncertainty, interviews with Nepali officials and community elders at the refugee camp suggested.

The men had criminal records and had spent time in jail. Mr. Dahal said he spent three months in jail related to two charges he faced in the United States — one of domestic violence and another of physical assault.

While felonies by immigrants in the United States can lead to deportation, the administration of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had decided against deporting those refugees who were practically stateless. According to an official of the U.N. refugee agency, Bhutan had agreed to take back the deportees under pressure from the Trump administration, which threatened the tiny kingdom with a travel ban — only to then push them across the border into Nepal.

While some deportees like Mr. Dahal are now in hiding in Nepal, others have been detained by Nepali forces, confined to the refugee camps and slapped with fines as they await deportation.

“We want to send them back to Bhutan,” said Tikaram Dhakal, a spokesman for Nepal’s department of immigration. “We wish Bhutan will accept them.”

The refugee camps in Nepal for the Bhutanese ethnic minority date back to the early 1990s.

Bhutan’s monarchy saw a threat in the growing numbers of Lhotshampas, an ethnic group who traced their lineage to Nepal and speak the Nepali language. Bhutan began a process of harassment and denationalization that human rights groups have described as ethnic cleansing. Over 100,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many forced to sign documents that renounced their citizenship and their right to their property or to ever return.

After more than a decade in which thousands of Lhotshampas lived in refugee camps in Nepal, the United States initiated a resettlement program in 2008 that, over the past decade and half, allowed over 90,000 of the refugees to find permanent homes. Others were resettled in European countries. Only about 7,000 refugees remain in the camps in Nepal’s Jhapa region today, many of them older people who have been left behind, waiting for their families to retrieve them after they resettle elsewhere.

“I had 29 acres of land in Kalekhola, Bhutan,” said Tarabir Gurung, 85, who is the only one in his family left at the refugee camp after his sons moved to the United States. “I can still recognize my house and land in Bhutan. I think everything is now finished for me.”

For some, like Narayan Kumar Subedi, 54, it seemed like only a matter of time before they would be able to resettle. Mr. Subedi stayed behind when his family first left to resettle, but he expected he would be joining them soon.

That changed with President Trump.

Mr. Subedi’s son, Aasis Subedi, was among those deported from the United States in the early days of Mr. Trump’s second term.

The younger Mr. Subedi had worked at a meat shop, a salad company and an Amazon warehouse across three different states since resettling in the United States in 2016. But he served five months in jail after being charged in 2022 with a third-degree felony for violence and assault. But because he was deemed stateless with no legal document from either Nepal or Bhutan, plans to deport him were paused, he said.

In March, ICE agents came for him early one morning at his apartment in Ohio. They handcuffed him and took him to a detention facility in New Jersey, where nearly a dozen others like him were being held. The rest of the journey resembled that of at least three other deportees The New York Times spoke with: They were flown to New Delhi and from there to Bhutan — where Bhutanese security forces picked them up and eventually ejected them across the border into Nepal.

Mr. Subedi was picked up by Nepali police and remained in detention for 19 days until his father petitioned the courts to release him into the confinement of the refugee camp while their case was investigated. The immigration department has fined him about $35 for illegal entry and $8 for every day of his continuing illegal stay.

“They arrived in penniless,” said his father, who works as an auto rickshaw driver. “How can I feed them when I am struggling to survive at this camp?”

Mr. Dahal, who is in hiding, and the other deportees are awaiting a final decision by the Nepali authorities on their fate. He fears that he will miss the final years of his parents, who are still in the United States. His father is 91 and ill.

“My aging parents are dying in my absence,” he said. “I have no other dreams but to spend time with my parents.”