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Vermont is home to one of the smaller Bhutanese-American populations of any US state by absolute number, but among the more concentrated relative to host-state size. The Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa residents who remain are clustered almost entirely in Chittenden County, in and around Burlington, the small adjacent city of Winooski, the western edge of Essex Junction, and the Intervale neighbourhood. They arrived between 2008 and the late 2010s through the UNHCR third-country resettlement programme, almost all of them resettled by a single voluntary agency: the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP), now operated as the Vermont office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), based in Colchester.^[1]

Population

The size of Vermont's Bhutanese community is genuinely uncertain, and any figure should be read against three different counts that do not match each other.

Cumulative arrivals. The federal Refugee Processing Center's WRAPS system records that Vermont resettled 7,956 refugees from all source countries between 1989 and 2019, an average of roughly 336 per year over the 2008-2016 peak period.^[2] Bhutanese refugees from Nepal were the single largest source country in that decade but were never the only group, sharing the caseload with Congolese, Somali, Iraqi, Burmese, Bhutanese-Bhutia, Eritrean, Syrian and later Ukrainian and Afghan arrivals. Independent estimates of cumulative Vermont Bhutanese arrivals from 2008 to roughly 2019 fall in the low thousands; no precise WRAPS country-of-origin total for Vermont has been published, and USCRI Vermont does not release a public running tally.

Local media estimates. Vermont reporting has cited a figure of "around 2,500" Bhutanese-Nepali residents in the Burlington area since at least 2018, when Vermont Public used that number in coverage of the community's suicide crisis.^[3] A 2024 Seven Days investigation into the community's deaf members put the state total at "approximately 2,000," and other recent local pieces have cited a Burlington-only figure of around 600. These numbers come from community organisations and resettlement agencies rather than from the census, and have not been recalibrated as families have moved out of state.

Census and ACS data. The 2010 US Census recorded that residents of Bhutanese origin made up 6.35 per cent of the population of Winooski and 2.04 per cent of Burlington — extraordinary per-capita densities for an immigrant cohort that had been in the country only two years.^[4] Those 2010 percentages are sometimes still quoted as if they were current; they are a historical baseline, not a 2026 measurement. The Vermont Agency of Transportation's Limited English Proficiency mapping for federal fiscal year 2024, which draws on rolling American Community Survey data, estimates that roughly 1,205 individuals in Chittenden County speak Nepali, Marathi or another Indic language at home, the great majority of them Bhutanese-Nepali.^[5] This is the most defensible recent figure for the linguistic-Bhutanese population in the state's main hub, though it understates the total because it excludes children and adults who speak English at home, and the Pew Research Center's Asian-American fact sheets do not list Vermont as a state with a tier-one Bhutanese population.

Out-migration. Vermont's small economy, expensive Chittenden County housing market, limited Bhutanese institutional infrastructure and harsh winters have together produced a documented secondary-migration pattern. Seven Days reported in 2019 that more than 40 Bhutanese-Nepali families — around 200 people — had relocated from the Burlington area to Columbus, Ohio, citing warehouse-job availability and a much larger Bhutanese community there. The article followed the case of Yam Mishra, a former Burlington resident who moved his family to Columbus in 2018, describing a shrinking circle of acquaintances in Vermont and a growing one in Ohio.^[6] Smaller numbers have moved to central Pennsylvania, the largest Bhutanese hub in the United States. Because USCRI reception counts the arrival but not the departure, the cumulative WRAPS figure systematically overstates the current resident population.

Reading the three counts together, the most honest statement is that Vermont's current Bhutanese population is somewhere between roughly 1,500 and 2,000, lower than the cumulative arrival figure and lower than the 2018-era "2,500" estimate that still circulates in local media. The community remains heavily concentrated in Winooski and Burlington and remains small enough that a single secondary-migration wave can change the total perceptibly.

For city-level history of the largest Vermont hub — including the Old North End, civic integration, and economic life — see Bhutanese Community in Burlington, Vermont. This article covers Vermont's Bhutanese presence at the state level, including the Colchester-based resettlement infrastructure, the Winooski cohort, the political environment, the 2016 Rutland resettlement controversy, and the 2025 federal enforcement crisis as it has reached Vermont.

Resettlement Infrastructure

Vermont has historically operated with a single refugee resettlement agency, an unusual arrangement among US states. The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program was established in 1980 and has welcomed more than 8,000 refugees over four decades. In the 2010s the agency was absorbed into USCRI, the national voluntary agency, and now operates under the name USCRI Vermont. Its main office is at 462 Hegeman Avenue in Colchester, immediately north of Burlington, with a satellite office in Rutland.^[7]

USCRI Vermont has consistently identified Bhutanese refugees from Nepal as one of its largest caseloads, alongside Congolese, Somali, Iraqi, Burmese, Bosnian and more recently Ukrainian and Afghan arrivals. In federal fiscal years before the 2017 federal cap reduction the agency was approved to receive roughly 250 individuals into the Colchester service area and a further 50 in Rutland. The agency provides reception and placement, English-language tuition, employment services, citizenship preparation, medical case management and bilingual interpretation, with several Bhutanese former clients now employed as case workers and interpreters.^[8]

By 2024 USCRI Vermont director Amila Merdzanovic publicly warned that the cost of housing in Chittenden County had reached the point where the agency was struggling to secure long-term accommodation for new arrivals — a constraint that has tightened the pipeline of new Bhutanese family reunification cases more than federal policy alone.^[9]

Geographic Distribution

Burlington and Winooski

The overwhelming majority of Vermont's Bhutanese residents live in or immediately around Burlington. The largest cluster is in Winooski, a one-square-mile city of fewer than 8,000 people that has become the most ethnically diverse municipality in the state. Per-capita Bhutanese density in Winooski is among the highest of any US city. The neighbouring Burlington Old North End — historically the city's working-class immigrant gateway — was the original landing point for most arrivals and remains the symbolic centre of Bhutanese cultural life. Many families have since moved north into Winooski or east into Essex Junction in search of more affordable rental housing.^[1]

The densest Indic-language census tracts identified in the Vermont Agency of Transportation's Limited English Proficiency mapping are in Winooski, the western part of Essex Junction and the Intervale corridor of Burlington.^[5] Population estimates for the Burlington-area Bhutanese cohort are discussed in detail under Population above; the short version is that the most-cited "2,500" figure dates from 2018-era reporting, that more recent estimates run closer to 2,000, and that secondary migration to Columbus, Ohio and central Pennsylvania has thinned the cohort over the past several years.

Rutland

Rutland, Vermont's third-largest city, has only a handful of Bhutanese residents and was never a primary resettlement site for the community. It is included here because of a controversy that has shaped state-level perceptions of refugee resettlement. In April 2016 then-mayor Christopher Louras announced, without first securing approval from the Rutland Board of Aldermen, that Rutland would become Vermont's newest resettlement community and would welcome about 100 mostly Syrian refugees. The plan generated intense local opposition. After the federal refugee admissions cap was sharply reduced in September 2017, only three families — fourteen people — had actually arrived. Louras lost his 2017 re-election bid to David Allaire, in part because of the backlash. The episode is sometimes mistakenly cited as a Bhutanese resettlement story; in fact Bhutanese refugees had been quietly funneled to Burlington and Winooski for years before the Rutland announcement, and the cancelled programme concerned a different population.^[10] The Rutland satellite office of USCRI Vermont was reactivated in 2024 to receive a small number of new arrivals from other countries, but Rutland remains marginal to the Bhutanese-Vermont story.^[11]

Other Vermont towns

Brattleboro, Montpelier, Bennington, St Johnsbury and the rest of Vermont have negligible documented Bhutanese populations. Vermont's substantial Tibetan Buddhist institutional presence — most prominently the Karmê Chöling meditation centre in Barnet, a Shambhala Buddhist seat founded in 1970 — is sometimes confused with the Bhutanese community in casual coverage, but the two are unrelated. Karmê Chöling is a Tibetan-lineage Buddhist centre serving an overwhelmingly American convert sangha and has no historical link to the predominantly Hindu Lhotshampa cohort resettled through USCRI.

Community Organisations

The principal community organisation is the Vermont Bhutanese Association (VBA), a volunteer body that all Bhutanese residents of the state are considered automatic members of. The VBA hosts the major Hindu festival cycle — Dashain, Tihar, Holi, Maghe Sankranti and Buddha Jayanti — and has played a long-running role in efforts to establish a Hindu temple in the Burlington area where elders can perform daily rituals and the second generation can learn Nepali language and Devanagari script. As of the mid-2020s no permanent purpose-built temple has opened in Vermont, with most ritual life still taking place in private homes and rented community spaces.^[8]

New Farms for New Americans (NFNA) is the most widely documented Bhutanese-adjacent project in Vermont. Operated since 2008 by the Association of Africans Living in Vermont (AALV) — despite its name, AALV serves all African and Asian refugee communities in the state — NFNA manages roughly five acres of farmland at the Intervale Center in Burlington and a further five acres in the Winooski Valley Park District. In a typical season around 80 refugee households (some 350 individuals) farm subsistence plots, growing crops adapted to their home regions. Bhutanese plots are recognisable by their dense rows of mustard greens, the leaves and stems of which growers traditionally sun-dry, ferment and re-dry to make gundruk. The July 2023 Lake Champlain valley floods destroyed most of the NFNA Intervale plots in a single growing season, an event widely covered in Vermont media as a refugee food-security story.^[12]^[13]

A women's knitting collective named Chautari — Nepali for the resting platform under a village tree — has been documented in Forced Migration Review as a notable example of psychosocial resilience among older Bhutanese women in Burlington. Vermont Folklife has produced ethnographic recordings of a Burlington Bhutanese-Nepali youth dance group that performs at citywide cultural festivals.

Political Environment

Vermont's political environment toward refugees has been broadly supportive but cannot accurately be described as the most progressive in New England, and is no longer formally a sanctuary state. Successive governors of both parties — Democrat Peter Shumlin and Republican Phil Scott — have publicly defended refugee resettlement, including Bhutanese resettlement. Scott in particular distanced Vermont from the Trump administration's first-term refugee cuts in 2017 and has continued to do so during the second Trump administration. In August 2025 Scott responded to a letter from US Attorney General Pam Bondi designating Vermont a "sanctuary jurisdiction" by publicly disputing the label, insisting that Vermont state law does not bar cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Sanctuary advocates and several Vermont municipalities have continued to maintain their own non-cooperation policies regardless of the governor's position.^[14]

2025 ICE Detention and Deportation Crisis

From early 2025 onward, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement began detaining Bhutanese refugees in multiple states under the second Trump administration's expanded interior-enforcement programme. The Asian Law Caucus and the Bhutanese American Refugee Rights network have documented at least 60 detentions and at least 13 deportations to Bhutan between March and December 2025, with cases reported in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, North Dakota, South Dakota, New York, Idaho and Vermont. Several of those deported to Bhutan were rejected on arrival and pushed across the border to Nepal, where some were arrested by Nepali police, leaving them stateless in a country that does not recognise them as citizens.^[15]^[16]

Vermont-specific cases remain less publicly documented than those in Pennsylvania or Ohio, partly because Vermont's smaller community has produced fewer named individuals and partly because the Burlington-area legal-aid network — including Vermont Asylum Assistance Project and the AALV Immigration Legal Services programme — has handled cases with a strong privacy protocol. The crisis has nevertheless significantly raised anxiety in the Burlington community, prompting Know-Your-Rights training, family-preparedness workshops and renewed coordination with USCRI Vermont and the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. As of early 2026 no Vermont-resident Bhutanese refugee had been publicly confirmed as having been deported to Bhutan, though community advocates have warned that this absence reflects the small size of the population rather than safety from federal enforcement.

Distinctive Features

Several features distinguish Vermont's Bhutanese community from larger US state cohorts. It is the smallest in absolute terms among the states with any concentrated presence; even Maine and New Hampshire have larger or comparable populations. It is also the most institutionally concentrated, with effectively one resettlement agency, one geographic cluster and one community association serving the entire state. The community's adjustment to the cold New England climate has been documented in academic literature as one of the harder transitions for arrivals coming directly from the warm sub-tropical refugee camps of Jhapa and Morang in eastern Nepal. And the unusual visibility of refugees in two small Vermont cities — well above the per-capita national average — has made Burlington and Winooski recurring case studies in the academic literature on refugee integration in small US cities.^[17]

Bhutanese Community in Vermont