Four of six Bhutanese refugees living legally in Pa. and taken into ICE custody have been deported, officials say
The whereabouts of the two other men taken into ICE custody were not immediately known.
Four of the six Bhutanese refugees who were taken into custody by ICE despite living legally in Pennsylvania have now been deported, a Dauphin County official said late Friday.
Six other members of the ethnic enclave who resided elsewhere in the United States were deported at the same time.
The four Pennsylvania residents are now believed to be in Panitanki, India, a town near the border with Nepal. The whereabouts of the other two who were taken into ICE custody were not immediately known on Friday night.
The office of County Commissioner Justin Douglas said in a statement that the four Pennsylvania residents were transferred from ICE detention at the Pike County Correctional Facility to a detention center in New Jersey, then subsequently flown out of the country.
Their deportation included a flight to New Delhi, India, followed by travel to Paro, Bhutan. Within a day of arriving in Bhutan, the men were no longer in the country, the office said.
Two of the Pennsylvania residents were from Allegheny County, one from Lancaster County, and one from Dauphin County.
“As this local crisis becomes international, I am deeply concerned about the implications for constituents both here at home and now abroad,” Douglas said in a statement. “There must be more time for legal due process before deportation — especially for refugees we’ve committed to resettle, who may now be facing dangerous and uncertain conditions.”
He is exploring all ways to help the local Bhutanese Nepali community at this time, he added. His office expects to release further updates on Monday.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday night.
Pennsylvania officials said last week that six former Bhutanese refugees who have legal immigration status had been detained by ICE, as President Donald Trump’s administration moved into a new, more aggressive phase of immigrant detentions, including of those who came here legally.
During a Tuesday news conference at the state Capitol building, local Bhutanese leaders and Democratic state lawmakers advocated for their immediate release and called on Pennsylvania’s federal elected officials to help.
Tilak Niroula, the head of the Bhutanese Community in Harrisburg, a civic organization, said in a statement Friday evening that he had met during the last week with Gov. Josh Shapiro, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, and with representatives of Sen. John Fetterman and those of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“My goal is to do everything in my power to keep our community safe, seek answers from those in leadership, and ensure that families are not left behind or forgotten,” he said in a statement on Friday.
Niroula earlier said that Bhutanese residents in the area are law-abiding citizens, but that if any of the people being detained did something wrong, they should have been given due process through the judicial system.
The families were not given an explanation of why their loved ones were being held by ICE, or if they were, it was not understood due to a language barrier.
The names of the detainees were not released by local officials. Niroula, however, disclosed three of their names with the permission from their families: Ashok Gurung, 32; Bikash Gurung; and Maita Gurung, 43. They are not related.
All six detainees are men ages 30 through 55 and were arrested at their homes or in public spaces this month, Niroula said.
The three whose names were disclosed each appear to have some form of criminal record, including mostly nonviolent offenses such as public drunkenness or harassment, according to state court records.
The Harrisburg area is home to one of the largest Bhutanese refugee communities in the country, an estimated 25,000, with many former refugees settling there because of its job opportunities, affordable cost of living, and physical likeness to their homeland, PennLive reported.
At least 70,000 Bhutanese-Nepali refugees live in the United States, research shows, their path to this country long and torturous. Many have been refugees twice, first in their ancestral homeland of Nepal, and again in their country of resettlement.
In the mid-1980s, the Bhutanese government launched a “One Country, One Nation” campaign to unify the country’s culture and religion, sparking political violence against Bhutanese Nepalis — and causing a major refugee crisis.
Within a few years, tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese fled or were expelled from Bhutan, and more than 100,000 ethnic Nepalese refugees from Bhutan moved into camps in southeast Nepal, according to the U.S. State Department. In 2006, the United States and seven other countries — Australia, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom — began a large-scale resettlement program.