Deportation from the US: the risks for stateless people

In July 2025, a disturbing story surfaced: Bhutanese refugees – people who had been formally resettled in the United States nearly a decade earlier – were being deported to Bhutan. Instead of ‘going home,’ they were met with persecution and expulsion. Swiftly pushed out again, they had no option but to return to the abandoned refugee camps where many had been born.

These deportations raise important questions about how resettled refugees have returned to statelessness.

Recently released datasets from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – made available through the Deportation Projects’ Freedom of Information Act request – offer part of the answer. These datasets contain information on arrests, detainments, and removals, but numbers on their own cannot explain why people once welcomed as model refugees are now being sent to a country where harm is foreseeable. To understand how these deportations became possible, we need to situate the data within a much larger migration story, and then look closely at what the data doesn't easily tell us.

Bhutanese refugees in the US and changes in deportation enforcement

Between 2007 and 2017, the Bhutanese were celebrated as a resettlement success story. After twenty-five years, the UNHCR managed camps were slated for closure. The international community undertook one of the largest coordinated resettlement efforts in modern history. It was a bold project: resettle every eligible person, close the camps, and resolve a protracted humanitarian situation. The United States led the initiative, agreeing to accept 85,000 Bhutanese refugees. They entered the US as permanent residents, and many became US citizens. At the time, this looked like a rare win – a complex crisis resolved through international collaboration.

This is why the 2025 reports are so alarming. Resettlement is supposed to be a durable solution, an endpoint that restores rights. But for people who were stateless before resettlement, the process can mask (rather than resolve) their underlying legal precarity. And when state administrative systems fail to identify statelessness, the protections intended for these individuals can fail.

In 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14159, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” which prioritises stricter deportation enforcement. The directive emphasises removal for people who entered without authorisation, but it also makes legally authorised immigrants (such as permanent residents) with criminal convictions a priority for deportation.

Missing data on statelessness

Against this new policy backdrop, I analysed ICE data to determine how many resettled Bhutanese individuals had been arrested, detained, or deported. This turned out to be far from straightforward.

Across all datasets, a fundamental problem appeared: ‘stateless’ is not an available option for citizenship. Although the Department of Homeland Security introduced reforms in 2023 to better identify and protect stateless people, those reforms were rolled back in 2025. The result is a statistical blindness: the system does not identify stateless people.

This leads to an obvious methodological question: how do you identify stateless Bhutanese refugees in a dataset that does not record ‘stateless’ as a category?

To analyse the data, I had to draw on what is known about the Bhutanese migration history and triangulate the data fragments that did exist – aligning dates of birth, places of birth, recorded citizenship, and years of arrival to determine who most likely belonged to the resettlement cohort.

A sharp increase in arrests, detention and deportation of Bhutanese refugees

In the arrest dataset from 2023-October 2025, out of 377,067 arrests, 82 involved Bhutanese individuals. Instead of comparing raw yearly totals, the analysis focused on monthly averages. The most striking pattern appears in 2025: from February onward, average monthly arrests increased by 500% compared with 2024.

Equally important is how these arrests occurred. Before the Executive Order took effect, roughly 75% of people were identified for deportation while already serving custodial sentences, most often in state prisons. After February 2025, that pattern shifted sharply: nearly 70% of arrests were attributed to Enforcement and Removal Operations or to fugitive operations, often coordinated with the US Marshals Service. This indicates a shift toward street‑level arrests and proactive enforcement rather than deportations arising from existing prison populations.

The Bhutanese represent a very small group, so their pattern cannot necessarily be generalised across the ICE data. Still, the data suggests a shift has occurred: far more active enforcement and greater inter‑agency coordination.

The ICE detention facility data is even more difficult to interpret because fields like country of birth and year of arrival are missing. Excluding those charged with immigration violations, seventy‑seven detained Bhutanese had criminal convictions, and two had pending charges. These convictions span both serious harm and minor misconduct: twenty‑nine sexual offences, twenty‑seven violent offences, eight property crimes, eight public order offences, three cases involving terrorist threats and two driving under the influence.

Human rights concerns

Sixty‑two people (plus four deported from state or local facilities) have been removed to what ICE lists as their ‘country of citizenship’: Bhutan. Again, sexual offences made up the largest categories, but the list also contains minor offences such as shoplifting and drug possession. This range suggests an immigration enforcement system that collapses a range of behaviours into a single outcome – deportation – even when removal may expose someone to a very serious risk of persecution.

Everyone deported has criminal convictions, some of them are extremely serious. States are permitted to remove people who violate criminal laws, even after conditional acceptance. But the deportation of Bhutanese refugees raises international human rights concerns – particularly under the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits sending anyone to a country where they are likely to experience severe harm. The risk that this could occur increases when judges or decision‑makers are not aware the Bhutanese are stateless, are unfamiliar with Bhutan’s treatment of the minority group and thus may not recognise the danger deportation poses.

Statelessness can reappear even after resettlement. In the Bhutanese case, the cause may be partly structural, an administrative assumption that everyone has citizenship creates blind spots. These blind spots obscure statelessness, making it easier for people to be removed to countries where the risk of significant harm is real.