Print — bhutanese-community-indiana — BhutanWiki

Indiana is home to one of the largest resettled Lhotshampa populations in the United States. The Obama White House, in a 2016 post marking the 85,000th Bhutanese refugee resettled in the country, listed Indiana among the five states that had absorbed the greatest share of arrivals, alongside Texas, New York, North Carolina and Georgia.^[1] The community is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Indianapolis metropolitan area, with smaller presences in Bloomington, Fort Wayne, Lafayette and a scatter of secondary migration clusters across the state.

Exact population figures are difficult to pin down. Neither the US Census Bureau nor the Indiana Department of Health reports Bhutanese-Americans as a distinct ethnic category, and community estimates vary. Central Indiana resettlement agencies and advocacy groups have commonly cited a Bhutanese-Nepali population in the low thousands for the Indianapolis area, though no independently verified figure exists. Secondary migration, especially from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Georgia, has complicated any direct count based on resettlement records alone.

Resettlement Origins

The Bhutanese community in Indiana traces its arrival to the third-country resettlement programme launched in 2007, which saw the United States accept roughly 92,000 of the approximately 113,000 Bhutanese refugees resettled worldwide from UNHCR-administered camps in eastern Nepal. Resettlement to Indiana began in 2008, the first full year of the programme. The refugees were overwhelmingly Nepali-speaking Hindus expelled or coerced out of southern Bhutan in the early 1990s under the Driglam Namzha cultural policy and a wave of citizenship reclassifications.

Indiana was not among the original top-tier destinations in the first year of the programme, but arrivals grew steadily through the early 2010s as resettlement agencies expanded their caseloads and secondary migrants moved to join relatives. Arrivals through the primary resettlement pipeline tapered toward the end of the decade as the eastern Nepal camps wound down, with the formal resettlement effort ending in 2017.

Indianapolis — The Primary Hub

The overwhelming majority of Indiana's Bhutanese-Americans live in the Indianapolis metropolitan area. Resettlement into the city is handled principally by Exodus Refugee Immigration, a nonprofit headquartered on the near-east side of Indianapolis. Exodus was founded in 1981 to serve Cuban arrivals from the Mariel boatlift and has since resettled refugees from more than 50 countries. The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis describes Exodus as the largest refugee resettlement agency in Indiana.^[2] As of 2022 it employed roughly 70 staff and resettled 586 people from nine countries that year. In 2022 Exodus also opened a second office in Bloomington.

Catholic Charities of Indianapolis has also participated in refugee resettlement in the Marion County area, though on a smaller scale than Exodus. Primary case management for new arrivals typically runs for 90 days, with extended services including employment placement, English-language instruction, legal aid and youth programming available for up to five years.

Distinction from the Burmese community

Indianapolis's best-known refugee story is not Bhutanese but Burmese. The city's south side — particularly Perry Township and Southport, sometimes nicknamed "Chindianapolis" — is home to the largest concentration of Burmese-Americans in the United States, numbering roughly 20,000, of whom about 75 percent belong to the Chin ethnic group.^[3] This Burmese population is a separate community from the Bhutanese-Nepali one and predates it by more than a decade, with Exodus beginning Burmese resettlement in the early 1990s. Some local reporting and secondary sources conflate the two groups; they should not be confused. The Bhutanese community in Indianapolis is smaller, later-arriving, predominantly Hindu and Nepali-speaking, and less geographically concentrated than the Burmese Chin community.

Neighbourhoods and settlement patterns

Bhutanese families in Indianapolis are dispersed more widely than the Burmese cluster in Perry Township. Community members have settled on both the south and west sides of the city, as well as in suburban municipalities in Marion, Hamilton and Hendricks counties. Housing affordability, proximity to Exodus's case management and access to service-sector employment have been the main drivers of settlement patterns. Unlike the Burmese Chin community — whose integration is anchored by a dense network of evangelical Christian churches — the Bhutanese-Nepali community in Indianapolis is organised principally around Hindu religious practice and Nepali cultural associations, though independent verification of specific congregations and organisational names in the Indianapolis metro area is limited.

Community organisations

Sewa International, a Hindu service organisation active in several US cities, operates a "Bhutanese Empowerment: Indianapolis" programme targeted at the local community, though as of early 2026 its programme page is under construction and detailed activity information is not publicly documented.^[4] The Hindu Temple of Central Indiana on the north-west side serves a broad South Asian diaspora, including some Bhutanese-Nepali worshippers, though it is not a Bhutanese-specific institution. Documentation of dedicated Bhutanese cultural associations, youth organisations or community centres in Indianapolis is thin in publicly available sources, and BhutanWiki welcomes contributions from community members who can add verified detail.

Secondary Indiana Hubs

Bloomington

Bloomington, home to Indiana University's flagship Bloomington campus, hosts a small Bhutanese-Nepali presence. The community grew modestly through the 2010s and was formally added to the state's resettlement network in 2022 when Exodus Refugee Immigration opened a second office in Bloomington to serve south-central Indiana. Indiana University's Tibetan studies programmes and its small Nepali-speaking student population give Bloomington a cultural profile distinct from the Indianapolis metropolitan area.

Fort Wayne

Fort Wayne, Indiana's second-largest city, is served by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, which has run a refugee resettlement programme since 1975. Catholic Charities describes itself as the only refugee resettlement agency in northern Indiana.^[5] As with Indianapolis, however, Fort Wayne's largest refugee population is Burmese, not Bhutanese — the city is one of the country's major Burmese resettlement destinations, with roughly 4,000 to 5,000 Burmese residents. The Bhutanese population in Fort Wayne is considerably smaller and less documented.

Lafayette, South Bend and smaller clusters

Smaller Bhutanese presences exist in Lafayette (tied to Purdue University and the surrounding service economy) and in South Bend, Evansville and Gary. These clusters have generally formed through secondary migration rather than primary resettlement and remain sparsely documented in public sources.

Economic Integration

Bhutanese-Americans in Indiana work across several sectors that reflect the state's labour market: hospitality (Indianapolis has a substantial convention, sports and hotel economy), warehousing and logistics (the Indianapolis International Airport area is one of the largest air-cargo hubs in the United States and the wider region is a major distribution centre for FedEx, Amazon and numerous third-party logistics firms), healthcare support occupations, food processing and light manufacturing. Community members have also moved into small business ownership, including grocery stores, restaurants and driving services, though documentation of Bhutanese-owned enterprise in Indianapolis lags that of the Burmese community.

Educational trajectories for the second generation pass through Indianapolis Public Schools, Perry Township Schools, Washington Township Schools and other Marion County districts, as well as post-secondary institutions including IUPUI (now split into Indiana University Indianapolis and Purdue University in Indianapolis), Ivy Tech Community College, Butler University and Indiana University Bloomington.

Political and Policy Context

Indiana's posture toward refugee resettlement has shifted sharply over the past decade. In 2015, then-Governor Mike Pence attempted to block Syrian refugee resettlement in the state after the Paris attacks; a federal court later struck the order down, and Exodus Refugee Immigration was the lead plaintiff in the successful legal challenge. In 2019, under President Trump's executive order 13888 requiring state consent for resettlement, Governor Eric Holcomb submitted a consent letter allowing the programme to continue in Indiana — a stance that distinguished him from several other Republican governors at the time. Mike Braun, who took office as governor in January 2025, has generally aligned with the second Trump administration's tighter posture on refugee admissions and immigration enforcement, though as of early 2026 no Indiana-specific executive action targeting Bhutanese refugees in particular has been publicly documented.

2025 Deportation Crisis

Beginning in early 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and deported multiple former Bhutanese refugees from several US states in what advocates and community organisations have described as a crisis of statelessness. Because Bhutan refuses to acknowledge most deportees as citizens, several of those removed have been turned away at the airport, stranded in India or Nepal, or rendered effectively stateless. Reporting by NPR, CNN, WESA in Pittsburgh, WITF in Harrisburg and India Currents has documented arrests and removals primarily from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania-based Bhutanese community hubs.^[6]^[7]

As of early 2026, publicly documented cases of Bhutanese former refugees being detained or deported from Indiana are limited in the national press and have not reached the visibility of the Pennsylvania or Ohio cases. Indiana-based community members have, however, expressed concern to resettlement advocates and the broader national Bhutanese-American networks that the Indiana community is under the same risk umbrella. BhutanWiki welcomes verified reporting from the Indiana Bhutanese community or from Indiana-based journalists covering specific local cases.

Bhutanese Community in Indiana