Bhutan–United States Relations

Bhutan–United States relations are the informal bilateral ties between the Kingdom of Bhutan and the United States of America. The two countries have never established formal diplomatic relations, and neither maintains a resident embassy on the other's territory. Practical contact is conducted through the US Embassy in New Delhi, which has carried the Bhutan portfolio for decades, through the Bhutanese Mission to the United Nations in New York, and, on refugee and migration matters, through the US Embassy in Kathmandu.^[1]

The defining feature of the relationship has been the resettlement of roughly 92,000 Lhotshampa refugees from camps in eastern Nepal to the United States between 2008 and 2016 under the US Refugee Admissions Program — by far the largest of the eight receiving countries. The resulting Bhutanese-American community, concentrated in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Georgia, New York and several other states, has numbered above 100,000 once US-born children are counted, and it has given the otherwise thin US–Bhutan relationship an unusually heavy demographic and political weight for the domestic US politics of a state with no embassy in Washington.^[2]

That demographic legacy became an acute diplomatic problem in 2025, when US Immigration and Customs Enforcement began removing resettled Lhotshampa green-card holders on the basis of old criminal convictions. Bhutan refused to readmit the returnees, who were transited through India into Nepal, where Nepal's Supreme Court stayed further removals. The episode brought the United States, Bhutan and Nepal into a three-way dispute that, as of early 2026, has no agreed resolution.^[3]

Absence of Formal Diplomatic Relations

Bhutan's foreign policy has always been selective. As of the mid-2020s, the kingdom maintained formal diplomatic relations with about 55 states, and pointedly had no bilateral ties with any of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia or China.^[4] This posture is a direct inheritance of the kingdom's twentieth-century "guided neutrality": under the Treaty of Punakha (1910) Bhutan accepted British guidance on external affairs in exchange for non-interference in internal ones, and after 1947 the 1949 Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship with India carried that arrangement forward. India remained Bhutan's sole close bilateral partner for decades, and the absence of diplomatic ties with Washington is less a rebuff of the United States than a consistent application of the same cautious rule.

In practice the absence has not meant the absence of contact. The US Embassy in New Delhi has been the long-standing channel for Bhutan-related correspondence, visas and occasional official visits. The Permanent Mission of Bhutan to the United Nations in New York is the only Bhutanese diplomatic post on US soil and functions as the country's de facto presence in Washington's orbit. On refugee and migration questions — including the 2025 deportations — the US Embassy in Kathmandu has handled contact with Bhutanese counterparts through the Nepali intermediary.

Early Contact and the Cold War Period

US interest in Bhutan began as part of the broader Cold War engagement with the Himalayan states following the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1950 and the Sino-Indian War of 1962. Washington treated Bhutan's entry into the international system as quietly beneficial, and supported the kingdom's admission to the United Nations in 1971 — a landmark pursued by the Third King, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, as part of his opening of Bhutan to the wider world. US development assistance during the 1970s and 1980s was routed principally through UN agencies and international NGOs rather than a direct country mission, a pattern that has persisted.

The most visible episode of direct US civilian presence in Bhutan was the Peace Corps programme, which operated from 1988 to 1998. American volunteers taught English and worked in rural development projects during a decade that coincided with Bhutan's modernisation push and, uncomfortably, with the expulsions of the Lhotshampa population from the southern districts. The programme was closed in 1998; no formal successor has been established.^[5]

Development Assistance, Education and Exchange

US development assistance to Bhutan has been modest in dollar terms and has flowed through indirect channels. USAID has never run a country mission in Bhutan and has instead supported Bhutanese programmes through regional and multilateral instruments, including UNDP, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. American foundations and NGOs — including the Bhutan Foundation, based in Washington, D.C. — have funded education, conservation and healthcare initiatives.

Academic exchange has been more durable than official aid. The Fulbright Program includes Bhutan among its country partners, funding Bhutanese graduate study in the United States and American researcher placements in Bhutan. US universities host a small but established cohort of Bhutanese students each year, and a number of Bhutanese public officials and senior civil servants hold US graduate degrees.

Trade and Tourism

Direct US–Bhutan trade is negligible by the standards of either country. Bhutanese exports to the United States are confined to small volumes of handicrafts, textiles, incense and some processed agricultural goods; US exports to Bhutan are similarly limited. The relationship is not governed by any bilateral trade agreement.

Tourism is more substantial. Americans are consistently among the larger groups of non-regional visitors to Bhutan under the country's "high-value, low-volume" tourism policy. All foreign tourists (other than those from India, Bangladesh and the Maldives) are subject to Bhutan's Sustainable Development Fee, which stood at US$65 per night for many years, was raised to US$200 per night in September 2022 as part of the post-pandemic tourism reform, and was reduced to US$100 per night in 2023 after the higher figure depressed arrivals. The SDF is applied uniformly to Americans and to other non-regional visitors.

The Refugee and Resettlement Dimension

The dominant thread in US–Bhutan contact over the past two decades has been refugee policy. Beginning in the early 1990s, US State Department annual human rights reports documented the expulsion of the Lhotshampa — Nepali-speaking Bhutanese from the southern districts — following the 1985 Citizenship Act and the 1988 census. Roughly 100,000 refugees accumulated in seven UNHCR-administered camps in Jhapa and Morang districts of eastern Nepal. The United States joined UNHCR, the European Union and India in calling for durable solutions throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but made no bilateral approach to Thimphu on the question.^[6]

The 2006 Offer and the Resettlement Programme

On 2 October 2006, US Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey announced in Kathmandu that the United States was prepared to resettle up to 60,000 Bhutanese refugees from the Nepal camps over the following three to four years. The offer broke a fifteen-year bilateral deadlock between Bhutan and Nepal by sidestepping it entirely: resettlement rather than repatriation became the centre of gravity for international action on the camps.^[7]

The first flights out of the camps departed for the United States in November 2007 and early 2008. Under the programme, which ran through 2016, the United States eventually received roughly 92,000 of the approximately 113,000 refugees resettled under the third-country resettlement framework coordinated by UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration. Other receiving countries — Canada, Australia, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and New Zealand — shared the remainder. The US share was by a wide margin the largest, and the US government became, in effect, the principal external party to the resolution of the Bhutanese refugee question.^[2]

The Bhutanese-American Community

The resulting community clustered around initial resettlement sites and secondary-migration hubs. Central Ohio — particularly Columbus, Reynoldsburg and Pickerington — became the largest single concentration, with community estimates placing the Ohio population above 30,000. Pennsylvania, especially Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, developed the second-largest concentration, with community figures reporting more than 70,000 Bhutanese-Americans in the state. Other sizeable communities grew in the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas, in Atlanta, Utica (New York), Louisville, and parts of North Carolina and New Hampshire.

The community built its own institutions quickly: the Association of Bhutanese in America, the Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization, local Bhutanese community councils in most major cities, Nepali-language churches and temples, and Bhutan News Service and Bhutan Watch as diaspora media. Naturalisation rates were high: by the early 2020s most resettled adult refugees had acquired US citizenship, though a substantial minority — the cohort whose legal vulnerability became visible in 2025 — remained lawful permanent residents without naturalising.

The 2025 Deportation Crisis

In March 2025 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement began arresting resettled Lhotshampa refugees in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas and placing them in removal proceedings. Most of those detained were green-card holders whose old criminal convictions — some decades old, some resolved by plea without jail time — had rendered them removable under US immigration law. An ICE statement described the operation as "executing the President's mission of identifying and removing criminal aliens and other individuals who have violated our nation's immigration laws."^[8]

The Removal Route

On or about 27 March 2025 a cohort of ten deportees was flown to Paro International Airport. According to the Kathmandu Post's contemporaneous reporting, the group was not admitted for long: within hours, Bhutanese authorities transported the men by road — a roughly six-and-a-half-hour journey — to the southern border town of Phuentsholing and handed them across the frontier at Jaigaon in India. Indian security personnel then escorted the group approximately 166 kilometres to the Panitanki crossing on the Nepal–India border, where on the night of 28–29 March 2025 they entered Nepal, reportedly after paying informal fees. Three of them — Asish Subedi, Santosh Darji and Roshan Tamang — were arrested by Nepali authorities at the Beldangi former-camp area for irregular entry.^[9]

Further Pennsylvania deportations followed between 7 and 14 April 2025, bringing the Pennsylvania-cohort total to twelve and the documented national total to at least twenty-four by late April. The Asian Law Caucus filed a Freedom of Information Act request on 26 June 2025 citing "at least sixty" arrests and "at least twenty-seven" removals, and by December 2025 AsAmNews reported cumulative figures "of at least fifty-three" Nepali-speaking Bhutanese removed. No single US government source has published a consolidated total.^[10]

Nepal's Supreme Court Stay

On 17 April 2025 the Supreme Court of Nepal issued an interim order staying the onward removal of four of the deportees from Nepali territory, citing international convention considerations. The stay did not resolve the underlying status question — Nepal itself is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or to the Statelessness Conventions — but it halted what had been a drift toward their being pushed back across the Indian border for another attempted return to Bhutan.^[11]

The Three Positions

The three governments involved took sharply divergent positions, and their framings are worth stating separately because they are not compatible.

The United States treated the removals as routine immigration enforcement. ICE did not publicly distinguish resettled Bhutanese refugees from any other removable cohort. Legal aid attorneys reported that ICE officers told detainees' families that "the government of Bhutan will welcome them" — a statement contradicted by the actual sequence of events once the flights landed in Paro.^[12] Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania publicly criticised the removals, calling it "unacceptable that these Pennsylvanians who fled Bhutan for their lives, after being forced out by a brutal regime, are now being deported to the same country that tried to erase them," and his office worked directly with ICE on remaining detainees.^[13]

Bhutan made no on-record public statement acknowledging the resettled-refugee returnees. The Royal Government's only 2025 public communications on Bhutanese nationals in the United States addressed a separate cohort — visa overstayers — whom the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and External Trade (23 June 2025) and Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay (4 July 2025) urged to return voluntarily. The PM estimated the overstayer population at four to five thousand, of whom about 1,500 were officially registered with the mission in New York. Neither statement mentioned the Lhotshampa returnees, the Phuentsholing handovers or the question of whether the deportees held Bhutanese citizenship. Bhutanese officials in the United States did not respond to requests for comment from US journalists covering the story.^[14] This silence was consistent with the long-standing RGoB position that resettled Lhotshampa, having left the camps as stateless persons of concern to UNHCR rather than as citizens, are not the responsibility of the Bhutanese state — a position grounded in the 1985 Citizenship Act and the 1988 census determinations.^[6]

Nepal initially treated the arrivals as irregular entrants and opened investigations under its immigration law. Officials from the Department of Immigration, the Home Ministry and the Foreign Ministry made public statements through late March and early April indicating that Nepal had no obligation to receive the men and was examining its options. The 17 April Supreme Court stay effectively prevented the government from returning them the way they had come, leaving Nepal as the de facto receiving state for several of the deportees without any legal framework for doing so.^[15]

Framings and Contested Language

The events produced a sharp divergence in vocabulary. US government communications used "removal" (the statutory term) and "deportation" (the journalistic one). Bhutanese government communications used "voluntary return," applied only to overstayers and never to the Lhotshampa cohort. Advocacy groups — the Asian Refugees United network, the Asian Law Caucus, United Stateless and diaspora organisations — characterised the removals as refoulement and the men as "rendered stateless." The word "repatriation" was avoided by all sides, because it would have implied that Bhutan was a legitimate home state for the deportees — a proposition that neither Bhutan (which refused readmission) nor the advocacy groups (which traced the 1990s expulsions as ethnic cleansing) were prepared to accept. No US federal court has, as of early 2026, issued a published ruling formally adopting the refoulement characterisation; an AsAmNews report of 18 December 2025 referenced a federal judge's ruling in a related case, the full scope of which has not been determined.

Kuensel and BBS Coverage

Domestic Bhutanese coverage of the crisis confined itself to the overstayer frame. Kuensel, through a June 2025 piece carried via Asia News Network and an earlier reflective feature titled "Living with fear in the US?", addressed the climate of fear among Bhutanese-origin residents of the United States and the MFAET's advisory to overstayers, but did not engage the resettled-Lhotshampa returnees as a category. BBS's reporting of Tshering Tobgay's 4 July 2025 statement followed the same pattern. This domestic silence on the resettled-refugee cohort is itself notable and is consistent with the broader patterned silence that Bhutan-based media maintain on the 1990s expulsions and their consequences.

Current State of the Relationship

As of early 2026 the formal position between Bhutan and the United States is unchanged: no diplomatic relations, no resident missions, no bilateral trade or defence agreements, and no public indication from either government that formalisation is under active consideration. Contact continues through the US Embassy in New Delhi, the Bhutanese Mission to the UN in New York, and the US Embassy in Kathmandu on refugee matters.

The 2025 deportation crisis remains live. Further removals have been reported through the end of 2025; the Asian Law Caucus FOIA litigation against the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department is pending; the Nepal Supreme Court proceeding on the four stayed cases has not reached a final order; and the population of Bhutanese-Americans still potentially at risk — lawful permanent residents with removable criminal convictions — is not publicly known. Advocacy by the Bhutanese-American community, by Senator Fetterman's office and by legal aid organisations has been the principal American political response. From Thimphu, no public response to the resettled-refugee cohort has been offered.

The contradiction at the heart of the current bilateral situation — that the United States, the largest receiving country of the Bhutanese refugees, is now returning some of them to a Bhutan that refuses to take them — has turned what was historically a marginal bilateral file into an active three-way diplomatic problem involving Washington, Thimphu and Kathmandu, without bringing the two governments any closer to formal ties.