Bhutanese Community in Ohio

Ohio is home to the largest state-level concentration of Bhutanese-Americans in the United States. Resettled Lhotshampa refugees and their descendants — overwhelmingly Nepali-speaking Hindus expelled from southern Bhutan in the early 1990s — number an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 statewide as of the mid-2020s, though no official census count exists and figures vary considerably between community organisations, academic studies and municipal surveys. The community is anchored by Columbus in central Ohio, with a substantial secondary hub in Akron's North Hill neighbourhood and smaller clusters in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton. Galion, a small town in Crawford County, hosts the Om Center Divya Dham, the single largest Bhutanese-Hindu religious property in the United States.

The state's Bhutanese population traces its origins to the Bhutanese refugee crisis of the early 1990s, when more than 100,000 ethnic Nepalis were expelled or coerced into leaving southern Bhutan. After spending up to two decades in UNHCR-administered camps in eastern Nepal — principally Beldangi, Goldhap, Khudunabari, Timai, Sanischare and Pathri — they were offered resettlement in eight countries under the third-country resettlement programme launched in 2007. The United States accepted approximately 92,000 of the roughly 113,000 who were resettled worldwide, and Ohio became the state that absorbed the largest share.^[1]

Scale and Distribution

No federal dataset reports Bhutanese-Americans as a discrete category. The American Community Survey counts them within broader "Asian alone" or "Nepali" fields, and community estimates therefore rely on resettlement agency records, community-based organisations and local news reporting. Community leaders cited by WOSU, Columbus Monthly, the Ohio Department of Development's office of research and the Cleveland-based Encyclopedia of Cleveland History place the central Ohio Bhutanese-Nepali population at roughly 23,000 to 27,000, making them among the Columbus area's largest immigrant groups. The Akron community, concentrated in the North Hill neighbourhood, is estimated at 4,000 to 8,000, with resettlement officials in 2020 giving a figure of 4,000 to 5,000 and more recent community estimates running higher as secondary migration continues.^[2]^[3]

Smaller communities exist in Greater Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton, mostly formed through secondary migration from other US resettlement sites. A substantial share of Ohio's Bhutanese residents were not initially placed in the state by resettlement agencies but moved there from Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky and elsewhere to join kinship networks, access community services and find work in central Ohio's warehousing, logistics and manufacturing sectors. This pattern of secondary migration has made the state's Bhutanese population grow considerably faster than the number of refugees directly resettled by voluntary agencies would suggest.^[4]

Regional Hubs

Central Ohio

Central Ohio is the heart of the Bhutanese diaspora in the United States. Resettlement began in 2008 through Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) and US Together. Within a decade, Columbus and its eastern and north-eastern suburbs — Reynoldsburg, Whitehall, Pickerington, Pataskala and Etna — had overtaken every other US city to become the country's largest Bhutanese hub. The community's civic, religious and economic institutions are concentrated along the Morse Road and Cleveland Avenue corridors and in the eastern suburbs. For a detailed account of the central Ohio hub, see Bhutanese Community in Columbus, Ohio.

Akron and North Hill

Akron's North Hill neighbourhood has been transformed by Bhutanese and Nepali resettlement since 2008. Refugees arrived through the International Institute of Akron, and the neighbourhood's affordable older housing stock, walkable street grid and proximity to entry-level employment made it attractive for secondary migration. North Hill is now home to Bhutanese and Nepali grocery stores, restaurants, community gardens, Hindu temples and the Exchange House community space run by Better Block and local partners. The transformation has drawn national attention as a case study in refugee-led urban revitalisation. For more detail see Bhutanese Community in Akron.^[5]

Galion and the Om Center Divya Dham

In 2023 the Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization (GBHO) acquired a 150-acre property at 4270 State Route 309 in Galion, Crawford County, and established it as the Om Center Divya Dham — the world headquarters of GBHO and the largest Bhutanese-Hindu religious site in the United States. The property, purchased with a community micro-loan campaign described by GBHO as involving roughly 108 interest-bearing loans from community members, includes two lakes, natural springs, forest and farmland, and is intended to serve as a Hindu pilgrimage and cultural centre for the Bhutanese diaspora. In July 2025 the Om Center hosted the Vishwa Shanti Gyan Mahayagya, a seven-day ritual that drew tens of thousands of pilgrims; organisers described the total attendance as around 50,000, though independent verification of the figure is limited.^[6]^[7]

Community Organisations

The Bhutanese Community of Central Ohio (BCCO), headquartered in Columbus, is the largest Bhutanese community-based organisation in the United States. Founded in 2010 and registered with the IRS under EIN 27-3514427, BCCO runs social services, youth programmes, senior support, citizenship classes, mental health outreach and civic engagement work. Its executive director Sudarshan Pyakurel is one of the community's most widely quoted spokespeople and has been a lead voice in Ohio's response to the 2025 deportation crisis. Smaller organisations include the Ohio Bhutanese-Nepali Community Organization (OBNCO) in Columbus, the Bhutanese Community Association of Akron and several North Hill-based youth and cultural groups.^[8]

Religious life is organised around multiple Hindu mandirs across central Ohio and Akron, a smaller number of Buddhist gompas for the minority Kagyu and Nyingma practitioners among the community, Nepali-language weekend schools for children, and community kitchens that mark the major festivals — Dashain, Tihar, Teej, Maha Shivaratri, Chaitra Navaratri, Ram Navami and Krishna Janmashtami. Cultural life is sustained by folk music and dance groups, rigsar and modern Nepali-pop performers, and a small but growing Bhutanese-Nepali media presence including community radio, YouTube channels and the Ohio-based New Americans Magazine.

Civic and Political Participation

Ohio has produced the first Bhutanese-American elected official in the United States. Bhuwan Pyakurel, who arrived as a refugee in 2009 and moved to Ohio in 2014, was elected to the Reynoldsburg City Council from Ward 3 in November 2019 and sworn in in January 2020, winning his race by a 14-point margin. He was subsequently elected president of the Reynoldsburg City Council. Pyakurel has been a visible advocate for refugee integration and, in 2025, for community members affected by ICE removal actions.^[2]

Several other Bhutanese-Americans have since contested school board, neighbourhood commission and precinct committee races in central Ohio, and the community has become a targeted constituency for both major political parties in Franklin County elections. Voter registration drives run by BCCO and allied organisations have naturalised thousands of community members since 2015. Despite this progress, the community remains politically under-represented relative to its size, and its legal status has been placed under new strain by the 2025 federal enforcement actions described below.^[4]

Employment and Economic Life

First-generation Bhutanese-Americans in Ohio are concentrated in warehousing and logistics (particularly Amazon and third-party fulfilment centres in the Columbus and Etna area), meat and food processing, hospitality, healthcare support occupations, cleaning and light industrial work. A growing number own small businesses — Nepali grocery stores, restaurants, driving schools, tax and immigration services, beauty salons and real estate agencies. Home ownership rates in the community are reported by BCCO and local news outlets to be unusually high for a refugee population, particularly in Columbus's eastern suburbs. The US-born and camp-born second generation is entering professional occupations including nursing, medicine, engineering, software, accountancy, law and teaching, with Ohio State University, the University of Akron, Columbus State Community College and Ohio University as common educational pathways.^[4]

Public Health and Mental Health

Ohio's Bhutanese community has faced documented public-health challenges. A 2013 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in MMWR 62(26) found that Bhutanese refugees resettled in the United States between 2008 and 2011 experienced a suicide rate of 20.3 per 100,000 — roughly twice the US average at the time — with central Ohio among the sites where the CDC and state health authorities conducted follow-up investigations. Community health workers, BCCO and partner organisations have since developed culturally specific mental-health outreach programmes, language-appropriate counselling services and survivor support groups. Language access, diabetes prevention, elder care and intimate-partner violence are also ongoing priorities for community health work.^[9]

The 2025 Deportation Crisis

Beginning in early 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiated removal actions against Bhutanese-Nepali community members across the United States, including in Ohio. The detentions targeted men — in most cases long-term lawful permanent residents — with old criminal convictions ranging from driving-under-the-influence to theft and assault, many more than a decade old. Independent reporting by Religion News Service, WITF, WESA, India Currents and Matter News has documented more than 60 detentions nationally and at least 25 removals by mid-2025, with Pennsylvania's Harrisburg area and Ohio's Columbus area as the two most affected communities.^[10]^[11]

Sudarshan Pyakurel of BCCO has reported multiple ICE detentions in central Ohio, including three arrests in a single week in the spring of 2025. Bhuwan Pyakurel and other Ohio-based community leaders have publicly criticised the removals as punishing refugees for minor or old offences and returning them to a country that refuses to recognise them as citizens. Several of those deported have subsequently been expelled from Bhutan to India or Nepal, leaving them effectively stateless. In April 2025 the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio issued a public statement condemning what it called the rapid deportation of a Bhutanese refugee from Ohio and urging ICE to allow the legal process to proceed. Matter News reported in depth on a specific Columbus-area case in which a long-term resident faced removal following an April 2025 detention.^[12]^[13]

The crisis has reshaped community priorities in Ohio. BCCO and GBHO have redirected resources into immigration legal assistance, know-your-rights training and political advocacy. Ohio's congressional delegation has received appeals from community leaders, and the issue has been raised in coverage by national outlets including NPR, AsAmNews and Religion News Service. As of early 2026 the removal actions had not been halted and further detentions have been reported.

Cultural Preservation and the Second Generation

A core concern for Ohio's Bhutanese community is transmitting language, ritual knowledge and memory of displacement to children born in the United States or too young to remember the refugee camps. Weekend Nepali-language schools operate in Columbus, Reynoldsburg and Akron, teaching Devanagari literacy alongside dance and music. Elder-led oral history projects, some supported by Ohio State University researchers, have recorded testimonies of life in southern Bhutan before 1990, the expulsion, the camps and the first years of resettlement. The Om Center Divya Dham in Galion has been positioned by GBHO as a long-term site for preserving Sanatan Hindu ritual practice among the diaspora.

The second generation's relationship to Bhutan is complicated. Few have visited the country their parents came from — in most cases, they are not permitted to. Instead, heritage is anchored in Nepal, in the camp experience, in the Lhotshampa political and literary tradition, and increasingly in distinctly American Bhutanese-Nepali identities forged in Columbus, Reynoldsburg and Akron. The 2025 deportation crisis has sharpened that identity work by reminding the community that legal status in the United States cannot be taken for granted.