ICE Turns Its Sights on Buryat Asylum-Seekers, by Andrea Prada Bianchi and Soyonbo Borjgin – 30 September 2026

From New Lines Magazine

A member of the persecuted Russian Mongol minority reveals the life he hopes to keep in the US, and the one he dreads if deported

One day, toward the end of April, Sandan Rabdanov was driving an 18-wheeler through Wyoming when he received a text from a friend. “There was a big raid in Wyoming yesterday. Be careful,” the message read. He needed to skip his rest stop in Rock Springs and leave the state, or risk running into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Rabdanov, 32, is a Russian citizen of the Buryat minority, a Mongol ethnic group living mostly around Lake Baikal in southern Siberia. The message said that two other Buryat truck drivers nearby — one of them a Buddhist lama — had just been arrested by ICE. So Rabdanov kept driving through the night until he cleared the state line. “I felt I was almost busted,” Rabdanov told New Lines, in one of several interviews conducted over the past few months.

Now living in Brooklyn, Rabdanov fled Russia in 2022 for fear of persecution for his activism against the Ukraine war, though that was only the latest among many episodes of feeling targeted and discriminated against.

One thread of the fraught tensions that exist between Russians and Buryats dates back to the 17th century, when Buryat nomadic tribes faced the arrival of Russian Cossacks colonizing the lands around Lake Baikal. In 1727, the Russian Empire and the Qing dynasty established the Sino-Russian border and cut off Buryats from the rest of the Mongol people, who today live mostly in Mongolia and Southern Mongolia (officially known as Inner Mongolia, in China). The Russian conquest was violent, with documented abuses and forced conversions to Christianity.

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Andrea Prada Bianchi is a journalist based in New York. Soyonbo Borjgin is a journalist and writer from Southern Mongolia, also known as the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, based in New York.

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