Bhutanese Community in New Jersey

The Bhutanese community in New Jersey is a small but established part of the wider Bhutanese-American diaspora, drawn from the population of Lhotshampa refugees expelled from southern Bhutan in the late 1980s and early 1990s and resettled from camps in eastern Nepal under the Third-Country Resettlement Programme that began in 2008. Unlike Pennsylvania, Ohio or New York, New Jersey was never a primary placement state for the Bhutanese cohort, and the community in the state is largely the product of secondary migration from those neighbouring hubs rather than direct USRAP arrivals.

Most Bhutanese-New Jerseyans live in Hudson, Union, Middlesex and Essex counties, where they are embedded inside a much larger and longer-established South Asian population that includes Indian-Americans, mainland Nepali-Americans and Bangladeshi-Americans. The state's high cost of living, particularly in the counties closest to New York City, has limited primary refugee placement, but the same density of South Asian institutions — temples, grocery stores, language schools, professional networks — has provided informal scaffolding for the smaller Bhutanese cohort that has settled there.

Population and geography

No published source gives a precise count of Bhutanese-Americans in New Jersey. The U.S. Census Bureau has estimated the national Bhutanese-American population at roughly 20,000 to 30,000 in recent American Community Survey releases, though community organisations and resettlement agencies place the true figure considerably higher when secondary migration and U.S.-born children are included.^[1] Pew Research Center's fact sheets on Bhutanese Americans, drawn from the 2017–19 and 2021–23 ACS, do not list New Jersey among the leading states of residence for the group, which is dominated by Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, New York and Georgia.^[1]

Community estimates and the small scale of local Bhutanese organisations suggest the New Jersey population is in the low thousands at most, almost certainly under 2,000 individuals. The largest concentrations are in:

• Hudson County — Jersey City and surrounding municipalities, where Bhutanese families live alongside the Jersey City Nepali Community (JCNC), a mainland-Nepali cultural organisation founded in 2017.^[2]
• Middlesex County — Edison, Iselin and Piscataway, the historic centre of New Jersey's Indian-American population, where Friends of Nepal New Jersey and the New Jersey Nepali Samaj host events that draw Bhutanese-Nepali families from across the state.^[3]
• Union and Essex counties — Elizabeth, Newark and surrounding refugee-resettlement towns served by the International Rescue Committee's New Jersey office and Church World Service Jersey City.
• Bergen and Passaic counties — small populations linked to the wider New York metropolitan diaspora.

Resettlement context

New Jersey was never designated as one of the principal placement states for Bhutanese refugees during the resettlement programme that began in 2008 and that ultimately moved more than 92,000 Lhotshampas from camps in Jhapa and Morang to the United States. The state's high housing costs near the New York metropolitan area made it a poor fit for the U.S. Department of State's "free case" allocation model, which preferred lower-cost cities such as Harrisburg, Akron, Syracuse and Atlanta where new arrivals could find affordable rent and entry-level employment.

The two voluntary agencies most active with refugees in northern New Jersey are the International Rescue Committee, whose Elizabeth office at 208 Commerce Place has resettled refugees from across the world for more than four decades and which served over 7,000 newcomers in 2024 alone, and Church World Service Jersey City, opened in 2015 as a CWS resettlement site for northern New Jersey.^[4][5] Neither agency has identified the Bhutanese cohort as a principal client population in its public materials, and most of the Bhutanese families now living in the state moved there after initial placement elsewhere — typically following work in healthcare support, hospitality or warehousing, or to join family members who had arrived earlier.

Community organisations and religious life

New Jersey does not have a long-established, free-standing Bhutanese mutual-assistance association of the kind found in Harrisburg, Columbus or Akron. The community's organisational life runs largely through pan-Nepali groups that include both mainland Nepalis and Bhutanese-Nepalis. Friends of Nepal New Jersey, an Edison-area cultural and humanitarian organisation, has supported Bhutanese-Nepali refugee projects alongside its work in Nepal, and Adhikaar, a New York-based advocacy group for Nepali-speaking workers and immigrants, defines its constituency as people of Nepali heritage from Nepal, Bhutan, India, Burma and Tibet, and serves clients across the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area.^[6]

Hindu festival observance benefits from New Jersey's unusually dense Hindu temple infrastructure, which is the most developed of any U.S. state outside California and Texas. The BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, Mercer County, opened in 2023 as the largest Hindu mandir in the Western Hemisphere and the second largest in the world, with a 213-foot main shrine on a 180-acre campus.^[7] Although the Akshardham is run by the Gujarati BAPS movement and primarily serves Indian devotees, Bhutanese-Nepali Hindu families from across the Northeast attend major festivals there. Smaller temples in Iselin, Edison and elsewhere in Middlesex County host more routine worship.

A minority of Bhutanese-New Jerseyans are Christian, often having converted in the refugee camps in Nepal or after arrival in the United States, and worship in Nepali-language fellowships hosted by mainline Protestant and evangelical congregations across the state. Buddhist Bhutanese in New Jersey are rare; the community's Hindu majority reflects the religious composition of the Lhotshampa refugee population in Nepal.

The Elizabeth Detention Center and the 2025 deportations

New Jersey's most consequential link to the Bhutanese-American story in 2025 is not its small resident community but the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, an ICE detention centre at 625 Evans Street in Elizabeth operated under contract by CoreCivic since 1997.^[8] The facility has long been a target of New Jersey immigration-rights organisers and is the subject of repeated calls for closure by the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice and the American Friends Service Committee.^[9]

In late March 2025, the Elizabeth facility became a transit point in the first wave of removals of Bhutanese refugees under the second Trump administration. According to reporting by WITF, WESA and the Philadelphia Inquirer, four Bhutanese refugees from Pennsylvania were transferred from the Pike County Correctional Facility in northeastern Pennsylvania to the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility on Wednesday 26 March 2025. By the following morning they had been removed from ICE custody and placed on a flight to New Delhi, and within roughly a day they were in Paro, Bhutan, where Bhutanese authorities refused to recognise them as citizens and pushed them toward the Indian and Nepali borders. Three of the deportees were subsequently arrested by Nepal Police for illegal entry.^[10][11]

The four Pennsylvanians removed via Elizabeth in March 2025 were the first publicly documented deportations in a wider campaign that had, by mid-2025, resulted in the detention of at least sixty Bhutanese refugees nationwide and the removal of more than a dozen, drawn from communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, the Dakotas, Vermont, New York and Idaho.^[12] NPR's coverage in December 2025 followed additional cases in which long-resident Bhutanese refugees with green cards or pending immigration matters were taken into custody and processed for removal despite Bhutan's refusal to readmit them.^[13] No Bhutanese resident of New Jersey has been publicly identified among the detainees or deportees, and the state's role in the crisis is geographic and infrastructural rather than demographic: New Jersey is where the removal pipeline runs through, not where it begins.

New Jersey itself, under Governor Phil Murphy, has taken a sanctuary-leaning posture on immigration enforcement, with the 2018 Immigrant Trust Directive limiting state and local cooperation with ICE. That directive applies only to state and county officers and has no bearing on operations at the Elizabeth facility, which is federally contracted.

Economic and educational integration

Bhutanese-Americans in New Jersey work mainly in the service sectors that absorb new arrivals across the wider tri-state area: hospitality and hotel housekeeping, food service, healthcare support, retail and warehousing in the logistics corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike. A smaller second-generation cohort has moved into pharmacy, nursing and information-technology roles, often via Rutgers University, the County College of Morris and other community-college pathways that are more accessible than the four-year private institutions of the surrounding region.

Bhutanese students in New Jersey public schools are typically classified under broader Asian or Nepali-language categories in district data, which makes it difficult to track outcomes for the cohort separately from the larger Indian-American and Nepali-American student populations. Anecdotal evidence from community organisers in Hudson and Middlesex counties suggests that New Jersey-raised Bhutanese youth, like their counterparts in Pennsylvania and Ohio, are entering higher education at rates well above their parents' generation, with concentrations in nursing, pharmacy, computer science and business administration.

Distinctive features

Several features set the Bhutanese presence in New Jersey apart from larger primary-resettlement communities:

• Secondary migration profile. The state is overwhelmingly a destination for onward movement from Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio rather than a place where families were originally placed.
• Embedding in a larger South Asian diaspora. Bhutanese-Nepali religious, cultural and commercial life runs through institutions built by mainland Nepali and Indian immigrants, including the temples, grocery stores and cultural societies of Edison, Iselin, Jersey City and Robbinsville.
• Sanctuary-leaning state policy. New Jersey's Immigrant Trust Directive limits state-level cooperation with ICE, but federally operated detention at Elizabeth has continued and the facility was central to the March 2025 deportations.
• Limited Bhutanese-specific institutions. Unlike Harrisburg or Columbus, the state has no major free-standing Bhutanese mutual-assistance association, language school or community centre, and most organising flows through pan-Nepali groups.

Coverage and gaps

Reporting on the Bhutanese-American population in New Jersey is unusually thin. The state is rarely mentioned in national coverage of the resettlement programme; most regional reporting on Bhutanese refugees in the Northeast has come from Harrisburg, Erie and other Pennsylvania cities rather than from The Star-Ledger, The Bergen Record or NJ Spotlight News. The 2025 deportation crisis was covered by NJ Spotlight News mainly through its reporting on the Elizabeth Detention Center contract extension rather than as a Bhutanese-community story.^[14] Researchers and journalists working on the New Jersey side of the diaspora should expect to rely on community informants, voluntary agency staff and pan-Nepali cultural organisations for population estimates and on-the-ground detail.

See also

• Bhutanese Americans
• Bhutanese refugee crisis
• Lhotshampa
• Third-country resettlement programme
• Bhutanese community in Pennsylvania
• Bhutanese community in New York State
• Bhutanese community in Connecticut
• Association of Bhutanese in America
• Bhutan–United States relations

References

1. "Bhutanese in the U.S. Fact Sheet" — Pew Research Center, based on 2017–19 and 2021–23 American Community Surveys.
2. Jersey City Nepali Community (JCNC) — official Facebook page, founded 2017.
3. Friends of Nepal New Jersey — official website.
4. "Elizabeth, NJ" — International Rescue Committee, office profile.
5. Church World Service Jersey City — official website.
6. Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice — official website.
7. "Swaminarayan Akshardham (Robbinsville)" — Wikipedia, summarising BAPS and press coverage of the 2023 opening.
8. "Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility" — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
9. "ICE Quietly Extends Elizabeth Detention Center Contract With CoreCivic" — American Friends Service Committee.
10. "Deported Bhutanese refugees in country less than 24 hours, at Nepal border" — WITF, 28 March 2025.
11. "Four of six Bhutanese refugees living legally in Pa. and taken into ICE custody have been deported" — Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 March 2025.
12. "Bhutanese Refugees Deported From the US Find Themselves Stateless Once More" — The Diplomat, April 2025.
13. "This refugee's family faced persecution in Bhutan. Now, he could be deported there" — NPR, 11 December 2025.
14. "ICE plans contract extension for Elizabeth detention center" — NJ Spotlight News, March 2026.