Tika Basnet sat facing the glow of her iPhone, a red tika pressed into the center of her forehead. Seven-month-old Briana slept on her lap, her breathing soft and uneven. On the other side of the screen was Mohan Karki, Basnet’s husband, who had yet to hold his daughter.

For Karki, nearly 9,000 miles (14,500km) away, it was already morning. He was in hiding in south Asia, his exact location withheld for his safety, his face breaking into pixels as he watched his daughter sleep.

“I feel like a ghost,” Karki said in Nepali. “Living in the shadows. No home, no name, not even an identity card that says I belong anywhere.”

Karki, 30, was deported to Bhutan on 13 January, after more than nine months in detention and a series of legal battles led by his wife and his attorneys in a final effort to stop his removal. Although Karki is stateless, his parents are Bhutanese, a distinction that has little bearing on his lived reality. He has never lived in Bhutan; he was born in a refugee camp in Nepal, and returning there exposes him to the risk of persecution and renewed statelessness.

Human rights advocates say this case reflects a broader and troubling pattern under the Trump administration, which has increasingly deported people – including refugees – to countries with which they have little or no connection, often placing their lives in danger. For years, Bhutan had refused to repatriate Bhutanese refugees, and no public repatriation agreement between the two countries exists, according to Aisa Villarosa, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, also involved in ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation tied to the removal of Bhutanese refugees.

“When you see a sudden shift in removal practices like this, it usually signals that some kind of government-to-government understanding exists,” Villarosa said. “What we’re trying to learn is what that understanding looks like.”

John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said Bhutan was not a country where deported refugees can legally remain. Recent reports from the organization describe ongoing human rights violations against Nepali-speaking political prisoners, documenting conditions it called dire and alleging that detainees continue to face torture and denial of fair trials.

“It’s not safe to be a stateless person,” Sifton said. Refugees sent back to Bhutan are often pushed across the Indian border within days, leaving them stranded without nationality. “That is an inherently risky and dangerous status to have.”

Sifton continued: “The idea that the US government would now say the place they were expelled from is safe contradicts two decades of US policy.”

An advocacy group estimates that at least 70 Bhutanese refugees have effectively vanished into statelessness, some now in hiding, others stranded in legal limbo after being sent to a country that does not recognize them as citizens.

Four days after delivering her baby, Basnet traveled from their home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, to Detroit, where Karki was held in detention. She spoke with lawyers between feedings and appeared at Nepali community gatherings and on podcasts and Facebook livestreams to ask for help in broken English.

“Motherhood and crisis,” she said, “arrived at the same moment, and neither waited.”

For Basnet, the deportation of her husband feels both personal and historical. “He doesn’t have a home there,” she said of Bhutan. “He doesn’t have family. He doesn’t speak the language. It feels like the history of expulsion is repeating itself, and no one seems to realize it.”

That history for Basnet and Karki traces back to the early 1990s, when more than 100,000 ethnic Nepali-speaking Bhutanese were forced out of the country during a state-led campaign that stripped them of citizenship and property.

“What we are seeing now in the United States is not new for many Nepali-speaking Bhutanese,” said Robin Gurung, co-executive director of Asian Refugees United, an advocacy organization supporting deported Bhutanese refugees. “Back then, the government decided who was worthy of citizenship based solely on ethnicity.”

Both Karki’s and Basnet’s families eventually resettled in refugee camps in eastern Nepal, where tens of thousands of displaced Bhutanese lived for decades. “Life in the camp was depressing,” Karki said. “We didn’t have enough food. We didn’t feel safe.” Even there, he said, he found small ways to hold onto childhood: “I loved playing soccer with my friends. That made me happy.”

In early 2008, under the George W Bush administration, the US began a large-scale resettlement program for Bhutanese refugees. By the end of Barack Obama’s second term, more than 85,000 Bhutanese refugees had been resettled in the US, including both Karki’s and Basnet’s families. Karki’s family arrived in Georgia in 2011. That same year, Basnet’s family resettled in Ohio.

“What I liked about Georgia, about America, was the abundance,” Karki said. “I convinced my father that once I finished high school, I wanted to join the US army, to give back to this country, and my father was OK with that decision.”

That dream unraveled less than two years after his arrival. In February 2013, Karki, who was 17 then, and two friends were arrested in Georgia and charged with burglary, criminal trespassing and interference with government property.

Karki has disputed the intent behind the incident.

“We were just trying to get home quickly after school,” he said. “One of my friends said we could jump the fence as a shortcut. We didn’t know you could get in trouble for walking onto someone else’s property.”

According to court transcripts reviewed by the Guardian, prosecutors alleged that jewelry was taken from the residence. The case did not go to trial, and no witness testified to seeing a burglary or theft. The only eyewitness account referenced involved someone who reported seeing individuals jump a fence.

Karki said he accepted a plea deal. “My lawyer told me if I agreed to the plea, I could go home that day,” he said. “If I didn’t, I might stay in prison for 25 years.”

Brian Hoffman, Karki’s immigration attorney, said the exchange reflected a common failure at the intersection of criminal and immigration law. “If your own lawyer is telling you, ‘This is a good deal, you should plead guilty,’ you’re not really listening to warnings about immigration consequences,” Hoffman said.

Cases like Karki’s, Hoffman added, reveal the brutal mechanics of the system. Crimes that may be minor under state law can be reclassified as “aggravated felonies” for immigration purposes, triggering mandatory detention and deportation. “It doesn’t make any objective sense,” Hoffman said. “But that’s the system.”

In August 2014, an immigration judge ordered Karki’s removal from the US. He was detained for about a month, then released under supervision after neither Bhutan nor Nepal accepted him. According to court documents reviewed by the Guardian and reporting from NPR, Karki was then released under an order of supervision, a status that allowed him to remain in the US under regular monitoring by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Karki maintained regular ICE check-ins, earned his GED and worked at a meat-processing plant in Georgia. In 2021, while visiting family near Columbus, he met Basnet at a local gym.

They exchanged smiles and left without speaking. Later that evening, Basnet received a Facebook message from him. Their community, she explained, was small and tightly connected. A mutual friend had told Karki who she was.

Late-night phone calls followed. They traded voice notes, TikTok videos and long conversations that stretched past midnight. Within a year, Karki moved to Ohio to be closer to her and his family.

Her parents initially opposed the relationship, worried about Karki’s immigration status, his education and his unstable employment. “They wanted me to marry someone with higher education, someone with a steady job,” Basnet said.

Karki was required to report regularly to immigration authorities to renew his work authorization, a process that often left him in limbo. Delays in paperwork made steady employment difficult. “I couldn’t keep a stable job,” he said. “Sometimes they delayed my permit.” He was eventually able to get his license to drive a commercial truck.

The couple eloped in December 2023.

“I knew it wouldn’t be easy for us,” Basnet said. “I knew I might have to carry a lot on my own. But I couldn’t love anyone else. He loved me deeply, and I knew he would make me happy for the rest of my life.”

Asked whether she ever feared his deportation, Basnet said she believed the risk had passed years earlier. “We knew they tried to deport him in 2014, and neither Bhutan nor Nepal accepted him,” she said. “He was born in a refugee camp. He had nowhere else to go. I felt confident they wouldn’t deport him.”

“He followed every rule,” Basnet said. “I thought he was safe.”

The sense of safety Karki and Basnet had built was short-lived. After Trump won the 2024 election on a promise of mass deportation, reports began circulating that Bhutanese refugees were being picked up as ICE expanded enforcement in immigrant communities across the country.

Only months earlier, the couple had been planning a future. They had saved nearly $20,000 for a down payment on a home. “We wanted a small place of our own,” Basnet said. “A room for our future kids.” Within days, everything changed.

On 2 April 2025, the couple drove to what they believed would be a routine ICE check-in. When they arrived, an agent told Karki to return on 8 April instead. “I knew something was off,” Basnet said.

“We hired an attorney that morning,” Basnet said. “Our friends told us that sometimes bringing a lawyer can stop ICE from detaining you.”

It didn’t.

“When we walked in, they called my husband’s name,” Basnet said. “Before he could even step forward, agents grabbed him and handcuffed him.”

Basnet and his attorney were ordered to wait outside. Minutes later, an agent returned and told them Karki would be transferred to the Butler county detention center and processed for deportation to Bhutan.

“I told them immediately he’s not from Bhutan,” Basnet said. “If he’s deported there, he’s not safe.” The agent responded that the decision came from higher authorities and that travel documents had already been issued by Bhutan.

Travel documents reviewed by the Guardian show that Bhutan has accepted deportees only as “non-Bhutanese”, a designation that does not guarantee residency rights or legal status inside the country. (The Guardian sought comment from Bhutan’s UN ambassador on the deportation agreement and travel documents, but received no response.)

In a statement, the UN refugee agency said deported Bhutanese refugees remained legally stateless because Bhutan did not recognize them as citizens and no other country claimed them as nationals. Returning stateless people to a country that refuses to recognize them creates a precarious situation, the agency warned. When asked whether it had communicated those concerns directly to the Trump administration, the agency declined to comment. (The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have not responded to requests for comment.)

Karki was transferred to St Clair county jail in Detroit on 9 June 2025, as his family, attorneys and advocates fought for his release. “They treated us worse than animals,” Karki said. He said he requested to see an eye doctor because he had a prescription for glasses: “I asked the ICE nurse. They told me they would arrange it, but it never happened.”

He also described harassment from other people incarcerated there. “People in jail targeted those of us detained for immigration,” he said. “They called us ‘illegal’ and all kinds of things.”

After more than six months of legal challenges, including a habeas petition denied in December, he was deported to Bhutan on 13 January – placed on a commercial flight to Newark, then to New Delhi. Villarosa said many Bhutanese refugees were being deported on commercial flights in what she described as a covert process that makes it “next to impossible” to track how many people have been removed. The Guardian reached out to Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, involved in the flights, for comment regarding concerns raised by human rights groups. Neither airline responded by publication time.

When Karki landed in India, he said, local authorities escorted him through the airport. The next day, he was placed on a flight to Bhutan.

“I had no documents with me,” Karki said. “No ID to prove who I was.”

When Karki’s plane landed in Paro, he said, the weight of that history finally caught up with him.

“That’s when it felt real,” he said. “I grew up hearing stories of torture from my family and elders. When I stepped onto that ground, I thought I was going to die.” He said Bhutanese officials gave him two options on arrival: prison, or a taxi to the Indian border.

He remains stateless, like many of the refugees deported before him.

Each day, he calls Basnet. They talk. They cry. Sometimes they laugh. She continues to campaign for his return while raising their daughter alone. Basnet works full-time and often takes extra shifts while she organizes, calls lawyers and speaks at community events.

“I work as much as I can,” she said. “Sometimes I leave my daughter with family and friends so I can keep fighting this.”

Asked whether she is exhausted, Basnet shook her head.

“I’m fighting for my family,” she said. “For my husband. For the future of my daughter that’s being stolen by the government.”