Babblejit “Bubbly” Kaur and her husband, Amarjit Singh, celebrated their 41st wedding anniversary in Long Beach in late November. The pair cradled a mint-frosted cake in their hands and beamed as their daughter, Joti, snapped pictures.
The couple endured a lot in those years, more than 30 of which have been spent in the U.S., after they fled religious persecution in India.
They arrived in 1994 with three young children and little money, facing a daunting asylum process. But the couple found their niche, operating a beloved Indian restaurant for decades, and saw their children through college.
This year had already been tough for the family. Singh was diagnosed with cancer and Kaur was laid off from her cashier job at Rite Aid, where she’d worked for decades, after the company closed in October. But the biggest hurdle for the family would come only days after the couple’s anniversary, on Dec. 1, when Kaur was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a routine fingerprinting appointment and eventually taken to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center.
Joti Kaur, the couple’s youngest daughter, collapsed at work when she heard the news.
“I tell her, ‘Anytime you’re thinking of me, I was already thinking of you,” she said from the patio of her Long Beach apartment. “You’re literally the only thing I can think about, and getting you out of there.”
Kaur had an approved green card, but the government had not yet released it, said Harman Singh, her eldest son. The family’s lawyer filed a habeas corpus complaint early last week requesting the court review the legality of Kaur’s detention.
Kaur and her husband operated a restaurant, Natraj Cuisine of India, for decades and became familiar and beloved faces in the coastal city. When she wasn’t working at Rite Aid, she’d be greeting customers at Natraj, alongside her husband, who also took charge in the kitchen as needed. Community members came out in droves to support the family, setting up a GoFundMe that has garnered over $26,000 and a Change.org petition with over 1,600 signatures.
Within days of her arrest, a popular Long Beach food group on Facebook had posted the news and caught the attention of Congressman Robert Garcia, who represents the state’s 42nd Congressional District, including Long Beach.
Garcia has filed a petition to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes immigration applications, requesting the expedited release of Kaur’s green card given the urgency of her husband’s care. His office has also sent requests to ICE and the Adelanto ICE Processing Center for her release.
The congressman said Kaur’s detainment is one of many cases across the country where “we’re encouraging people to do things the right way and to show up to appointments, and then we’re detaining them at appointments that we invited them to.”
“The Long Beach community is outraged about this,” he said. “It’s absolutely crazy and inhumane. It’s no way to treat people.”
Kaur’s arrest was carried out by FBI agents, Laura Eimiller, the agency’s media coordinator confirmed to The Times, as “part of our ongoing assistance to ICE relative to immigration enforcement.”
One of the main tactics of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration in recent months has been detaining people at appointments during their asylum or visa proceedings and, in some cases, deporting them.
His mother’s absence has left an immeasurable gap in their family, Harman Singh said. They’ve had to pick up where she left off, handling bills and navigating their father’s cancer treatment. In a way, he said, it felt like mourning a loved one’s death, only “they’re physically still here in the world, you just can’t reach out to them.”
“This vacuum, this gap, it’s all over America,” Harman Singh said. “This is not just our story.”
Kaur and Singh had been joined at the hip since they wed in 1984, the same year violence against Sikhs, their religious community, erupted in India. India’s Punjab state was a Sikh kingdom before the British took over, and the community had long been fighting for a separate Sikh state in the region.
In 1984, tensions came to a head when a siege, ordered by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the holiest site in Sikhism, turned deadly. In retaliation, two Sikh bodyguards assassinated her. Hindu mobs then went on a rampage, killing thousands of Sikhs, in what the California Legislature has labeled a genocide.
Large swaths of the Sikh community began to flee India. His parents watched as people around them — friends, cousins, neighbors — were disappeared and later found dead, Harman Singh said.
They left for the U.S. a decade later. Now, their son said, they’re facing persecution similar to that from which their parents fled all those years ago.
“This was supposed to be the place where you have freedom to live without fear … but it’s sort of turning into that nightmare again,” Harman Singh said. “We’re just repeating what our parents ran away from.”
Today, the Sikh diaspora, who have mostly settled in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, are still targeted. Canadian-Indian relations were strained after the murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil in 2023. The Canadian government alleges India’s government was behind the slaying, claims New Delhi has denied.
In August 2024, a truck transporting a Sikh political leader came under fire in Sacramento. In 2023, U.S. officials announced they had foiled an assassination attempt connected to the Indian government against a Sikh activist.
Natraj Cuisine of India on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, was like a fourth child to Kaur and Singh.
Singh first worked as a waiter at the old Laguna Beach location before transferring to Long Beach. Eventually, they became the face of the restaurant, often working more than 12-hour days. The couple managed the restaurant’s daily operations until their departure in 2020.
“The best way to describe my mom, she will feed everybody in this room and the neighbors before she feeds herself,” Joti Kaur said. “That was their love language, feeding us, the community, and anyone they could.”
Kaur worked at Natraj whenever she wasn’t picking up a shift at Rite Aid and would head to the restaurant during her lunch breaks.
The couple left the restaurant just weeks before COVID-19 hit in 2020. They recently became involved in another restaurant, Royal Indian Curry House, which is still in development.
“They were looking forward to help doing that and getting back into serving meals, because that’s what they love to do,” Joti Kaur said.
Singh depends on his wife for nearly everything, their children said. She took the lead in getting the family settled in the U.S., learning English, getting a driver’s license and even figuring out how to hook up Harman Singh’s PlayStation.
When Singh was diagnosed with cancer, his wife once again took charge. The family looked to her whenever a crucial decision needed to be made.
The day of her appointment, she felt something was wrong.
“She called me that morning and she was anxious,” Joti Kaur said. “I wish I would’ve stayed on the phone with her a little bit longer. She already knew something wasn’t right.”
Harman Singh, who now lives in Sacramento, was also on edge, having seen the countless cases of immigrants detained at government-set appointments.
Fingerprinting appointments had become common practice for the family, who have been tangled in a web of asylum proceedings since they landed at a New York airport in 1994. The two oldest children, including Harman Singh, have since become naturalized citizens. Joti Kaur and her dad have green cards. The only one left waiting was Kaur.
The government already had Kaur’s fingerprints on file, which is why the family was puzzled when they received notice of this appointment.
“You have a hearing coming up and it’s like, if they don’t go, they’re in trouble. If they go, they’re in trouble,” Harman Singh said. “They set it up in such a way that they’re going to get the result they want.”
Now, for the first time in decades, Kaur and Singh have been forced to sleep in separate beds,their children said, and neither gets much sleep at all.
“That was hard enough, just knowing that he’s gonna be battling cancer, but Mom was by his side,” Harman Singh said. “Now there’s just a sense of loneliness that they both have. We are helpless, and we can’t do anything to fix that.”
The lights in the Adelanto ICE Processing Center never turn off, which is enough to keep most awake. It’s the noises, often cries from newly arrived detainees, however, that keep Kaur up, often well past 2 in the morning.
She’s lucky if she gets a couple of hours of sleep a night, her children said.
The guilt creeps into both children at all hours of the day. Joti Kaur often feels it late at night, when she’s curled up under the covers of her bed and is suddenly reminded of how cold her mom must be. Her brother feels it every time he puts on a jacket or turns on the hot water in the shower.
Every family dinner Joti Kaur missed or phone calls she cut short when her mother was still home add to the guilt.
“I wish I could take it back and go to those dinners and have spent that time, because now, I don’t know when the next dinner is going to be with her,” she said.
A light amid the worry, however, is the community that her mother has built at the detention center. She’s met women of all ages and from all walks of life, one as old as 85.
When Harman Singh arrived at Adelanto to visit his mom for the first time in early December, he heard the women inside erupt in cheers. The noise felt jarring in such a cold facility.
But it’s what the women do for one another every time one of them gets bonded out, his mother told him.
“There’s just a sense of camaraderie. They’re like, ‘We’re in this together,’ which I’m very grateful for,” Harman Singh said. “She has girls to talk to. She goes, ‘If they weren’t there, I would just be in depression right now.’”
His mother has connected with two Indian women. The trio often pray together, and ration whatever milk they get that day to make tea. One is younger, and has started calling Kaur mama.
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