ICE Deportations Create Fear and Isolation in California’s Sikh Community

Below are excerpts from their conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. For the full interview, listen to the audio linked at the top of this story.

Atop the rolling hills of East San José sits the largest Sikh temple in the United States, its white domes visible for miles.

Inside, on an October Sunday, music drifted through the prayer hall and congregants made their way to langar, the community kitchen where free meals are served each day. For decades, this gurdwara has been both a spiritual anchor and a lifeline for tens of thousands of worshippers.

But over the past year, a quiet, growing fear has settled into the space.

South Asians are rarely included in conversations about undocumented communities, yet 35,000 people from India were apprehended at the U.S. border this year — many of them Punjabi Sikhs. Some arrive seeking political refuge; others come on temporary visas and take low-wage jobs that leave them especially exposed when immigration policy shifts.

Following a January memo from the Department of Homeland Security, expanding where officers can operate, federal immigration agents are more routinely showing up at formerly protected “sensitive locations” — hospitals, clinics, schools and places of worship. The intensification of ICE enforcement across California has left many Sikh immigrants wondering whether even their gurdwaras are still safe.

Gurdwaras act as a touchstone for medical care, social services and community support for Sikh Punjabi immigrants and their families. With Punjabi being the third most-spoken language in several California counties, many find solace in the in-language information the space offers.

Journalist Tanay Gokhale spent the past year with this community, reporting for India Currents, a San José–based nonprofit magazine serving South Asian immigrants.

He joined The California Report Magazine host Sasha Khokha to explain how rising ICE activity is reshaping daily life for Sikh immigrants in California.

Below are excerpts from their conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. For the full interview, listen to the audio linked at the top of this story.

Only why he turned his attention to Sikh Punjabi immigrants

When the administration’s immigration crackdown started, I was thinking of how this might impact the Indian diaspora. And generally, when you think of the Indian diaspora, you think of an affluent group of well-educated people who are accomplished.

But few people know that Indians are actually the fifth-largest undocumented group in the country. And this community is largely underreported and a lot of these people are Sikhs coming from [the state of] Punjab to settle in California. They’re working blue-collar jobs like agricultural labor or in the trucking industry. I also thought about how the immigration crackdown is also impacting immigrants’ health outcomes because people are more afraid to go out and seek health care.

On what changed after President Donald Trump took office in January of 2025

The DHS issued the memo on Jan. 21, right after the Trump administration took charge. It basically allowed ICE officers to conduct operations inside places of worship, which in the past was a big no-no unless it was absolutely necessary.

Right after the memo came out, there were also some false rumors about ICE raids in gurdwaras across the country, and that further fueled the paranoia and fear.

Suddenly, Sikhs around the country were thinking, “Hold on, if I go to the gurdwara every Sunday, but this time when I step out, is there a chance that I’m gonna get picked up by ICE?” And that led to a lot of fear among the community and gurdwaras were reporting a drop in attendance.

I spoke to Narenda Singh Thandi, a former Amtrak bus driver who’s now serving as the president of the West Sacramento gurdwara. And he was talking about how he’s concerned that immigration activity would go against the decorum that gurdwaras need to maintain.

“We don’t want ICE in the temple,” Thandi said. “We don’t want people to go with the shoes on, with guns on, which is against our system.”

When Sikhs go to the gurdwara, their heads are supposed to be covered at all times, and there’s absolutely no weapons allowed inside. You’re also supposed to take your shoes off before you enter the prayer hall. If an ICE operation or a homeland security operation is happening, chances are that officers aren’t necessarily gonna follow that.

On why gurdwaras are essential support hubs — and the cost of staying away

Gurdwaras are a house of worship, but they’re also kind of like resource hubs for new immigrants, especially those who do not speak English and only speak Punjabi. These are spaces where you pray, but you also seek out fellowship: you meet a familiar-looking face from your city back home in India.

The gurdwara offers all of these wonderful services like you mentioned. So, when you’re seeing a drop in attendance in gurdwaras because of fear of immigration activity, it also means that congregants are not accessing these services, and that can lead to some pretty serious outcomes for their health.

I spoke to Dr. Harpreet Singh Pannu. He’s a Kaiser doctor, but on Sundays, he runs a free medical clinic at the San José gurdwara. By training, he’s an internal medicine specialist, but at this gurdwara, he is a physician, he’s a mental health counselor, he’s a health advocate, he’s a health educator — all rolled into one.

Especially among older congregants, someone who speaks in Punjabi offers a level of comfort and familiarity that they often cannot find in a hospital, which can seem foreign and sterile.

“We don’t make a difference in terms of whether they are documented or undocumented,” Pannu said. “But there is reluctance because they are worried if they come here, they could end up in trouble.”

By ‘ending up in trouble,’ he’s talking about getting picked up by ICE in a raid, and this is especially problematic for some of the older congregants who have this as their only point of contact with any sort of health practitioner.

On one man’s quiet support for Sikh detainees

In 2016, driven purely by his own curiosity, Simran Singh made the 20-minute trip [from his home] to the Mesa Verde detention center. He didn’t expect there to be any [South Asian detainees], but was actually surprised to see that there were three.

Detention centers can be really isolating places for detainees.

You’ve just had a months-long journey from India to the U.S. border, and suddenly you find yourself in this place where you have very little personal space and there’s also nobody to talk to because you’re often speaking different languages.

A phone call — an international phone call back home — costs 85 cents a minute. You can work an entire day, and you can barely scrape together enough money to speak for one minute to your family.

Singh completed a four-hour volunteer course that the detention center offers. And once he completed that, he had access to the detainees. He found that none of the detainees had access to gutke — a holy prayer book that Sikhs usually have on their person — and it is a really important part of prayer and Sikhism and of their faith.

“Most of them weren’t fluent in English,” Singh said, “It was just heartwarming to see them have something that connects them to the outside world so they’re not just isolated in this place.”

He visited every week with some langar food, gutke, turban cloths and Punjabi newspapers to keep them updated on what was happening back home in India.

On the battle to protect articles of faith behind bars

Detainees did not have access to articles of faith — no gutke, no prayer beads, no turban cloths. There’s a lack of awareness and lack of resources on the ICE detention centers part.

For example, in detention centers, detainees cannot keep hardbound books on their person. But the gutke are almost always hardbound because they’re holy and they’re supposed to be kept protected at all times, and they shouldn’t have any damage.

When Singh found out, he found an importer in India, a manufacturer who makes softbound gutke and he added a layer of zip-close bag protection as security. And then it was okay to distribute them among the detainees.

Another contentious article of faith is the turban. Sikh men are required to wear a turban to cover the head at all times. It’s very important to them. It’s a representation of their faith. And taking off one’s turban, especially in public, represents great dishonor among practicing Sikhs.

But in 2022, there were dozens of cases in which Sikh detainees were forced to take off their turbans at the border by immigration officers. In some cases, the turbans were thrown into the trash right in front of them.

On shared suffering and solidarity

In some ways, the detainees are all in the same boat with respect to some common struggles. They’re all away from home, they’re all anxious about their future, their families, their finances.

Often, there’s a language barrier that prevents them from connecting, except sometimes through faith. In that kind of a situation, faith becomes a really powerful thing to hang on to.

Singh also found that prayer beads — malas —that he was bringing to Sikh detainees are actually used by multiple faiths. They’re used in Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism and other faiths as well. And that became a point of connection inside the detention center.

“The South Asian detainees would also take back extra malas to give out to people and so kind of build this relationship with someone from El Salvador or Mexico,” said Singh. “Neither of you are speaking English well, but now you have something to give to them, and that gesture goes a long way.”

On why this community needs greater attention and support

When Singh visited the detention facility for the first time in 2016, he saw three South Asian detainees. Now he’s seeing 65, of which half are Sikhs.

There’s still not enough advocacy and enough support for this population, even within the Indian diaspora. It is heartening to see people like Singh stepping in, doing everything that they can and filling in that gap, but I do think there needs to be more advocacy and support and just general awareness about this population.