Updated September 6, 2025 at 6:00 AM CDT
PORTLAND, Ore. – On Monday December 4, 2023, Nurul Haque finally belonged somewhere.
That's the day he and his Rohingya Muslim family arrived at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. Earlier that year, they had been granted refugee status in the U.S. and allowed to leave the overcrowded refugee camp in southern Bangladesh where they lived – where Nurul Haque had spent literally his entire life up until then.
"ALHAMDULILLAH [Thanks be to Allah]," he recalled thinking to himself as the plane touched down on U.S. soil. "I am now free and independent."
Stateless, futureless
Rohingya Muslims are an ethnic minority group from majority-Buddhist and Burmese-dominated Myanmar.
Despite living in Myanmar's western Rakhine state for thousands of years, Rohingya have never been fully recognized as citizens since Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, gained independence in 1948. Nearly 40 years later, Myanmar enacted a law classifying people based on their ethnicity. The Rohingya were not included on that list, effectively stripping citizenship from any Rohingya who had managed to obtain it and unequivocally barring any Rohingya from ever becoming citizens of Myanmar.
Because of this unwanted status, the ethnic group known as the world's largest stateless population has faced decades of persecution by security forces in Myanmar. Waves of violence over the years have prompted generations of Rohingya to flee their homes — only to end up in refugee camps in other countries where they are often denied the right to travel or get jobs.
Today, 1.3 million Rohingya refugees are spread across the world.
The largest exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar happened in August of 2017, when violent attacks drove out over half a million members of the ethnic group. Most of them ended up in the already overcrowded and squalid camps in Bangladesh – the same camps where Nurul Haque's parents fled in 1990, just two years before he was born, a stateless person and a refugee.
Today, his parents remain there as part of the largest concentration of Rohingya refugees, some 1 million, outside of Myanmar, based on the latest figures from the U.N., which reports that refugees continue to arrive. An estimated 2.6 million Rohingya are internally displaced inside Myanmar as of August 2024 – most of them women and children.
When NPR met Nurul Haque in 2017 in Bangladesh, he said he had little hope of getting out of the refugee camp. Because he lacked status, he couldn't get a job and obtaining an education was challenging. Meanwhile, the process of relocating somewhere else as a refugee was long and difficult.
"My mind is so, so, so low," he despaired in a 2017 interview with NPR. "There's no future here."
Over the years since that interview, Nurul Haque told NPR that he did what he could to make some money and eventually got an education. He also ramped up his work in a civil society organization he helped establish in 2016 called the Bangladesh Rohingya Student Union. The still-active group advocates for rooting out things like drugs, child marriage and human trafficking from the refugee camps.
"[The Union has] over 700 boys and girls based in the Bangladesh refugee camps," he said. "And at the very beginning it was very tough because people did not know very much about this kind of organization."
Still, Nurul Haque said, the work fulfilled him with meaning and purpose.
But it also made him a target.
"I was kidnapped"
Inevitably, the work Nurul Haque's organization was doing caught the attention of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and Fortify Rights, an organization that researches human rights violations and supports survivors. He began passing along information about illicit activities and documenting violations perpetrated by the various gangs and militant factions in the refugee camps.
Nurul Haque said he faced multiple threats over the years. "We had so many struggles and we faced a lot of challenges."
It all came to a head in December 2020, when he was kidnapped by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a powerful militant group. They accused him of writing a report that made them look bad.
"Then they took me into a tea shop and then they investigated me," Nurul Haque said, recalling that the report in question did not even include his name, which he pointed out to his kidnappers.
He was finally released with a warning:
If he published anything negative about ARSA, they would kill him.
"So then I never feel [sic] safe, and then I complained to the UNHCR," he said.
An investigation by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees found the threats against Nurul Haque were valid. The agency confirmed to NPR that its office in Dakah helped facilitate his move to the U.S. in 2023.
A home with walls
Today, Nurul Haque and his family – his wife Taslima, and two children, Jawad and Jasmine – are among the some 12,000-strong Rohingya refugee population settled in the U.S. And while their ground floor, two-bedroom apartment home in southeast Portland, Ore., may be simple, it is a far cry from the muddy, tent-filled refugee camp they came from.
Not only does his new home have actual walls, Nurul Haque's children can go to school.
There's food on the table and he has a job with the Oregon Department of Human Services where he helps Oregonians and new arrivals to the U.S. access government services.
But it's not just a job that pays, it's a job that allows him to give back, Nurul Haque said. "That was one of my ways and my promise after I come in [sic] USA, that I can help some of them through my service."
Still, even with this new life, Nurul Haque often worries about his people, particularly his parents.
"I applied [for refugee status] for them, but they're still living there," he said. "They are living outside the camp and I want to bring them out, they want to live in the US."
The future of the Rohingya is very dark, Nurul Haque said. Inside Myanmar, violence, such as bombings, torture and mass displacement, perpetrated by security forces continues against them. Meanwhile, Rohingya refugees face the threat of being expelled from other countries they've fled to, such as India.
"Right now, I don't see any future at all," he said, noting that unless the Rohingya are recognized by all the stakeholders – everyone from the Myanmar government and security forces, to the countries where Rohingya refugees have fled – that they belong in Myanmar, any plans to return them there are not possible.
In recent months, he has also begun to worry about his life and community in the U.S., as the Trump administration terminates protections for Afghans and other vulnerable groups and suspends the admission of most refugees to the country.
"Many refugees like me," Nurul Haque said.
NPR reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to ask if there were any plans to revoke the refugee status of Rohingya already resettled in the U.S. They have not responded to that request for comment.
And because Nurul Haque knows his new life in the U.S. could be taken away at any time, he says, work every day to prove he deserves it.
Copyright 2025 NPR
