Subu Vedam: It’s Now One Year in ICE Custody

What is there to say about the case of Subramanyam Vedam at this point? Only this: 

• It has now been a year since he was released from the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon.
• And it’s been a year since he was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
• And it’s been six months since an immigration judge stopped the Department of Homeland Security from deporting Subu to his native India. 

Subu was released because, after 43 years in prison, a Centre County judge agreed with what he had been saying all along: that he had been wrongfully convicted of murder in 1983 and 1988. 

He was detained because he was arrested before he could get sworn in as an American citizen and because in addition to the now-vacated murder conviction, he was serving a concurrent sentence for selling LSD.

Had there only been the drug charges and no murder case, Subu would have been eligible for parole 40 years ago. In seeking to deport him, DHS labeled Subu, barely out of his teens at the time of his arrest, as “a career criminal” who would return to his wicked ways if he were to be released.

Vedam fought his detention by ICE and seemed to have won — twice. First, after he was flown to an ICE processing center in Louisiana that serves as a launching pad for flying non-citizens out of the country, he won a stay of the deportation order.

Then, last April, an immigration judge lifted the deportation order altogether. Judge Adam Panopoulos reviewed Subu’s record of service, good conduct and educational achievement across all the decades in prison. He listened to Subu argue that the things he did as a kid coming of age in State College do not reflect “who I am and who I want to be.” 

The judge’s conclusion: Vedam was now “a person of good moral character,” whose banishment to India – a country he left when he was 9 months old and whose languages he does not speak — would “not be in the best interests of the United States.”

So what’s he still doing in ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg? DHS has appealed Judge Panopoulos’ decision. Plus another immigration judge denied Subu’s petition to be released on bond pending a ruling on the DHS appeal.

At this writing, there’s no clear indication of when all this will be resolved, one way or another. Subu’s sister, Saraswathi Vedam, tells me the Board of Immigration Appeals has 284,903 cases in their queue.

And so Vedam, 65 years old, white-haired and white-bearded, remains in a 70-bed dormitory, trapped behind a high, razor-wire-topped fence, still being held to account for minor crimes he committed when, as he put it at his hearing in April, he was “young and stupid.”

In the dozen years since I began writing about Subu’s case, I have heard from people who remain convinced that he killed his friend Thomas Kinser. I also heard from people who didn’t understand why Subu didn’t confess to the murder and express remorse in hopes that the pardons board would commute his sentence.

To both groups I would say that Subu has consistently maintained that it would be hard for him to confess to a crime that he did not commit, and that he clung to the hope for judicial relief in the form of a ruling that he had been wrongfully convicted.

Judicial relief came, but then ICE came and now Subu waits for judicial relief to come again.

Some of you, I’m sure, are familiar with “The Short Hiker,” Jean Aron’s guide to hiking in Central Pennsylvania. One of the hikes begins at Colerain Park, a state forest picnic area in Spruce Creek, about a half-hour from State College off Route 45. The climb, Jean writes, “is relentlessly up.”

That didn’t faze one of her hiking companions. “I always remember a friend from India who used to regard this as her favorite hike,” Jean writes. “While most of us struggled, she, clad in simple sari and sandals, would seem to float, effortlessly and serenely to the top.”

The friend from India was Nalini Vedam, Subu’s mother. Whatever else Subu does when he emerges from behind the razor-wire fence for the final time, I like to picture him heading over to Spruce Creek and taking the same hike that his mom took.

I can see him, too, floating effortlessly and serenely to the top. 

At the end of her description of the Colerain hike, Jean Aron offers a poem, titled “Ode to Arbutus.” The first stanza goes like this: