One cloudy morning this past March, 36-year-old Aasis Subedi found himself back in the country his family had fled when he was 4. At the airport in Bhutan, he recognized the traditional bakhu dress of the approaching government officials; a surge of anxiety passed through him.

Subedi had arrived alongside nine other Bhutanese men who had immigrated to the U.S. legally but were deported because of criminal convictions ranging from substance abuse and trespassing to assault and burglary. Although they had been born in Bhutan, all the men were ethnically Nepali — a group that, beginning in the 1980s, was stripped by the Bhutanese government of their citizenship. Over the years, Bhutanese Nepalis have been imprisoned, tortured, and, in many cases, chased off their land and expelled from the

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