An American Dream That Ended Where It Began

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The American dream means different things to different people. For many migrants from Asia, the trip to the United States is a long flight and a fresh start. A recent story in The Kathmandu Post, reported by Mahesh KC, follows a far harder path. It traces the journey of Rajendra Khadka, a 32-year-old former pharmacy owner from Rukum West, whose attempt to reach America through the so-called “donkey route” took him across 18 countries over 14 months, left his family more than Rs11.5 million in debt, and ended in deportation.

A call, and a promise

Mahesh KC reports that it began on December 7, 2023, with a phone call. “It’s time to leave for America,” the caller told Khadka, instructing him to come to Kathmandu at once. Khadka, who ran a small chemist’s shop in Salle Bazaar, had spent months weighing the move, drawn by the hope of better income and stability. He had already handed his passport to a local intermediary. The agent’s promise, Khadka recalled, was simple: within a week or ten days, connecting flights through Mexico would carry him into the United States.

According to the Post, that promise dissolved almost immediately.

A journey that kept stalling

Khadka was first told he would fly to Dubai, then bused instead toward India and flown from Bagdogra to Mumbai. There, he told the reporter, he found 80 to 85 other Nepalis waiting to reach the United States through similar routes. The group was shuttled back to Kathmandu, then on to Dubai, where the demands for money started.

The agent asked for Rs500,000, then, a month later, for another Rs4 million, the Post reports. Khadka’s family borrowed heavily from local moneylenders to keep up. Even after paying, the group did not move. Khadka said their visas expired, they were blacklisted by immigration authorities, and they were sent back to Mumbai. A later attempt routed him alone to Uzbekistan on the promise of tickets to Cuba that never came. Again the visa expired, and again he was returned to Mumbai.

Through Africa

From there, KC writes, the route turned toward Africa. Khadka was flown to Uganda, then to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he said the food was hard to eat and rain poured through the roof. He was moved across the Congo River to Brazzaville, then sent back to Kinshasa, where an agent demanded a further Rs1 million before releasing travel documents and then vanished with the cash.

Throughout, Khadka hid the worst of it from his family, the Post reports. He described the payments as routine travel costs and told relatives he was steadily nearing the border. Believing him, they kept borrowing at high interest. By the time he left Africa, he said, he had paid more than Rs6 million. A flight to Ethiopia and on to Brazil followed. After nearly eleven months on the move, the United States seemed within reach.

South America and the Darién Gap

Landing in Brazil did not end the exploitation. Khadka told the reporter that his own agent staged a fake kidnapping, using local thugs who assaulted the group and took the few thousand dollars they had kept for expenses. He moved through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, robbed, he said, at 25 or 30 different points along the way, with even police in Peru searching migrants for hidden cash.

In Colombia, the Post reports, Khadka and a dozen other Nepalis were taken hostage by an armed group that demanded $20,000 from each of them and stopped feeding them when they could not pay. They were held for 47 days. His family raised another Rs1.7 million to free him. He then faced the most feared stretch of all, the Darién Gap, the roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama. “We regularly came across bodies in the jungle,” Khadka told the Post, describing migrants who had died of illness, exhaustion or violence.

The border, and what came after

Beyond Panama, Khadka moved through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and into southern Mexico, KC reports, paying at nearly every step. Near the border, smugglers loaded dozens of migrants into the cargo bed of a truck under an airtight cover before Mexican authorities intercepted them. After a brief detention and a hunger strike, the group was released on condition that it leave the country. Shortly after 2 a.m. on January 24, 2025, Khadka climbed a fence and entered the United States. Fourteen months had passed since he left Rukum.

Within minutes, the Post reports, US Border Patrol agents took the group into custody. Khadka was held in Arizona and then in a federal facility in Mississippi, where he said he lived largely on instant noodles for 11 months and 16 days. He applied for political asylum, arguing that returning to Nepal would put him at risk. But by his final hearing in September 2025, the reporter notes, the government his claim rested on had collapsed in the Gen Z movement. The judge found the threat he described no longer existed, rejected the application, and ordered him deported.

In February 2026, shackled at the hands, waist and legs, Khadka was flown back with around 80 other Nepalis. The plane landed at Tribhuvan International Airport on February 1. He told the Post that people stared and took photos as the deportees emerged, and that he kept his head down. Exhausted, he collapsed on the pavement outside the terminal.

What it cost

By his own calculations, KC reports, Khadka paid about Rs9.47 million directly to traffickers and middlemen, with another Rs2.025 million going to emergency payments, transport, ransom and survival along the way. The total passed Rs11.5 million. His business is gone, his family remains in debt, and the memories still haunt him. “I came back with nothing,” he told the Post. “Nothing except the debt.”

AI Assistance: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI Explorations process. For more, see the original article linked above.

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