For Mohan Karki, fatherhood is a series of pixels on an iPhone screen. He watches his seven-month-old daughter, Briana, sleep from nearly 9,000 miles away, a baby he has never held. This digital separation is the direct result of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) order that deported him not to a home, but to a history of persecution.
Karki was removed to Bhutan, the very nation that exiled his ethnic minority family decades ago. He now finds himself in hiding, a ghost in a system that defines him by a passport while ignoring the political reality it represents. His story is a stark case study in the devastating logic of modern immigration enforcement.
This is not merely an unfortunate outcome; it is the predictable result of a bureaucratic machine operating on rigid, often outdated, inputs. ICE's mandate prioritizes removal, frequently defaulting to a person's country of birth for deportation without a meaningful assessment of the current dangers or the individual's actual connection to that nation. For people like Karki, whose families fled as refugees, the U.S. is enforcing a citizenship that exists only on paper.
Herein lies the critical issue: American policy is creating a new class of stateless individuals. By deporting someone to a country that has already rejected them, the U.S. government is not repatriating a citizen; it is externalizing a problem and creating a person without a state. This practice transforms ICE from an enforcement agency into an arbiter of belonging, effectively rubber-stamping the persecution that asylum seekers originally fled.
The broader implication is that the U.S. system is ill-equipped to handle the complexities of global migration and identity. It treats nationality as a fixed data point, not as the fluid and often fraught reality it is for millions. The algorithm of enforcement overrides the human narrative, resulting in policies that are as illogical as they are cruel.
As Mohan Karki watches his daughter grow up through a screen, his description of feeling “like a ghost” becomes literal. He is a phantom of policy, caught between the nation that rejected his family and the one that just deported him. His predicament is a warning of the profound human cost when inflexible systems are tasked with deciding who belongs.
