Bhutanese Refugees in Pennsylvania Face Deportation Amid Immigration Crackdown

HARRISBURG, Pa. — At a park in the hills of central Pennsylvania, children in jerseys shout in a mix of English and Nepali, chasing a ball across the grass while their parents watch from the sidelines. A mother cheers on her son. For this community of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees, the field is more than a field. It's where they've rebuilt a homeland that no longer exists.

Tens of thousands of Bhutanese refugees settled in Harrisburg starting in the late 2000s, after their families were forced out of Bhutan in an ethnic-cleansing campaign on the Lhotshampa people, as the country sought to modernize and unify and the government enacted policies in the 1980s that targeted ethnic Nepalis' legal status and culture. The refugees spent nearly two decades in camps in Nepal. It was there that soccer became a lifeline. Barred from work permits, families built farms and schools by day. At night, they turned to the sport to help cope with their traumas. One refugee, Kalu Singh Tamang, had been a national soccer star in Bhutan before the expulsion. In the Beldangi camps of Jhapa, Nepal, he coached thousands of fellow refugees on how to play. He died in the camp, never getting the chance to leave.

That tradition crossed the ocean with the community that carried it. In 2007, the U.S., with the support of the U.N., initiated a program that resettled about 85,000 refugees. Each year, a memorial tournament bearing Tamang's name reunites refugees from across the country. Birkha Gurung, one of its co-founders, said he started it because, "When we were in Nepal, in the refugee camp, I played with [Tamang] and he coached so many of the refugee soccer fans. Our community, especially the adults, are having so many problems with mental health issues [since the camps], so I started this adults' tournament." Proceeds now fund Soccer for Success, a youth program serving over 50 kids a week — passing the game down to children who might never see the camps or the country their parents fled.

Both programs run through Asian Refugees United (ARU), a Harrisburg nonprofit that also teaches cultural classes to refugee children. But the fields have become something else too: one of the few places this community still feels safe, as it faces a wave of deportations unlike anything it has seen before.

Under an intensified immigration crackdown, dozens of community members have been deported over the last 18 months. Before March 2025, the U.S. government did not deport these stateless refugees regardless of criminal history. Now they are being flown to Bhutan — a country that still refuses to recognize them as citizens and expels them on arrival to India or Nepal. Unable to repatriate to Bhutan, Nepal, or the U.S., they are left stateless twice over, with nowhere left to land.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment.

ARU co-founder Robin Gurung has traded running soccer programs for full-time advocacy, spending evenings and weekends with immigration attorneys, training staff in civic engagement, and flying to Washington to meet lawmakers. "We were not prepared for this when we [built] the rapid response team. Our job now requires us to talk to the family members, folks who are in ICE detention. The immediate need is to stop the deportations. Folks who are deported, they are not safe," Gurung said.

The fear has outrun the deportations themselves. Bhagawat Dulal, a Soccer for Success coach who now also translates for detainees, said even ordinary life has started to feel dangerous. "I had some people I was talking to ask, 'Can I go garden or should I not do that because of the [ICE] situation?' The one thing that has always been there through Bhutan, Nepal and to America: We found a way to garden, because that is what brought us joy — and now the same people are scared to go garden," Dulal said. "I'm so frustrated."

Even so, the fields fill every week with children learning the game from their elders. The community still gathers to mark their religious festivals. Their trades from life before the camps are flourishing through small businesses. On the soccer field, as everywhere else, they keep carrying forward what ARU staff member Manju Gurung called, ahead of a day of advocacy on Capitol Hill, "a future of hope, for our parents and all refugee parents around the globe."