It was 2022, and the Nepali flea market in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, buzzed with life –handmade hats and colorful flags hung outside the homes of families just yards from the market, who had built new lives after being expelled from Bhutan. Elderly men sat in circles, smoking cigars and playing folk songs, unwilling to let the past slip away.
In the early 1990s, Bhutan expelled more than 100,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese people during a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Most fled to refugee camps in eastern Nepal, where many remained for nearly two decades. Beginning in 2007, about 85,000 were resettled across the US through a program coordinated by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the US government. Today, central Pennsylvania is home to several thousand Bhutanese refugees, with Harrisburg and nearby towns hosting one of the largest clusters in the country. That concentration carries political weight: Pennsylvania is a swing state, and Trump won it in 2024 by a slight margin.
