Six Bhutanese green card holders living in central Pennsylvania were arrested in the first two weeks of March, according to local refugee community leaders and elected officials.
Five of the men were from Dauphin County, and the other was from Cumberland County. Their family members say they do not know why the men were taken by ICE.
Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas has been working with the families and other elected officials to get details, which are so far scarce. Some of the men have past criminal convictions or are facing charges in Pennsylvania, Douglas said, but not all of them.
Tilak Niroula, board chair for the Bhutanese Community in Harrisburg, said all of the men came to the United States through the refugee resettlement program between the years of 2012-2016. All have families here, Niroula said. None speak English and will require translators.
“If anyone is convicted of any criminal charges, we do have a justice system, we have a code. We want to follow the due process,” he said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, over 100,000 ethnic Nepalese were expelled from Bhutan. In 2006, the United States and other nations began to admit them as refugees.
Roughly 85,000 Bhutanese were resettled in the U.S. by 2016, with Texas, New York, Indiana, North Carolina, and Georgia accepting the most refugees. Large numbers of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees settled in Dauphin and Lancaster counties, with additional refugees in the Pittsburgh region.
Bishwa Chhetri, another member of the Harrisburg Bhutanese community, said Bhutan’s government would not allow them back.
“There is a regime sitting there, ready to kick us out again and throw us into refugee camps in Nepal,” he said. “Our case is a little bit unique. We have nowhere to go. We adopted this country as our home.”
Niroula says there is nowhere for ICE to deport Bhutanese refugees to, as Bhutan does not want to accept them, and many of these refugees do not consider Nepal their homeland.
“We do not have a country. Deportation is not an option for Bhutanese Americans,” he said.
Arrests
ICE agents arrested Ashok Gurung at his Harrisburg home on March 9, according to his sister, Devi Gurung. He is currently being held in the Moshannon Valley Processing Center outside Phillipsburg, ICE records show.
Ashok Gurung served three years in prison in Georgia after getting in a fight, his sister said. WITF confirmed 2013 arrest records of an individual with the same name and age in Georgia, where Gurung previously lived, for felony aggravated assault.
“We live in a climate of fear since he has already served for what he had done,” Devi Gurung said. “He was already working, he was leading a normal life. We are all very surprised and we want him back.”
WITF found charges for DUI and public drunkenness for two of the other men arrested, and confirmed at least one of them was transferred to a detention center in Texas.
The families do not know what kind of deportation proceedings their loved ones may face. Green card holders have the right to have their cases reviewed by an immigration judge.
State Reps. Dave Madsen, D-Dauphin, Justin Fleming, D-Dauphin, Joseph Hohenstein, D-Philadelphia, and state Sen. Patty Kim, D-Dauphin all spoke against ICE’s actions and encouraged people to reach out to federal officials.
“Don’t go overboard,” Fleming said. “We need to make federal officials uncomfortable.”
The authority of county and state officials over issues of immigration is limited, he said, because that is a federal issue.
Congressman Scott Perry and Sens. Dave McCormick and John Fetterman did not respond to inquiries by the time of publication. Neither did the governor’s office. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office declined to comment.
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Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Tilak Niroula’s first name.