This is just horrifying on so many levels I hardly know what to say:
On the morning of Oct. 3, 2025, Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam walked out of Huntingdon State Correctional Institution, the Pennsylvania prison that had confined him for more than four decades. The 64-year-old had spent nearly his entire adult life behind bars for a murder he did not commit.
His conviction had been vacated weeks earlier after a court found that prosecutors had concealed evidence that would have dismantled the state’s case. The Centre County district attorney formally withdrew all charges a day before his expected release. But Subu never made it home.
As he stood on the threshold of freedom, officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were waiting. Acting on a decades-old deportation order, they detained him and transferred him to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an ICE detention facility in central Pennsylvania. His family, who had prepared to welcome him home, instead learned that Subu would remain in custody — not as a prisoner of the state, but as a detainee of the federal government.
“To our disappointment, Subu was transferred to ICE custody and is currently being held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center,” the family said in a statement posted on a website dedicated to building support for Vedam’s case. “This immigration issue is a remnant of Subu’s original case. Since that wrongful conviction has now been officially vacated and all charges against Subu have been dismissed, we have asked the immigration court to reopen the case and consider the fact that Subu has been exonerated. Our family continues to wait — and long for the day we can finally be together with him again.”
Subu’s legal odyssey began in 1982, when he was arrested for the 1980 murder of his friend, 19-year-old Thomas Kinser, in Centre County. Prosecutors argued that Subu had shot Kinser with a .25-caliber pistol — a weapon that was never recovered — and based their case largely on circumstantial evidence. He was initially arrested in 1982 and convicted the following year, being finally sentenced to life without parole.
For the next 42 years, Subu maintained his innocence. His appeals were repeatedly denied, and his case languished until the Pennsylvania Innocence Project joined his defense team. In 2022, the project’s attorneys discovered previously undisclosed evidence in the files of the Centre County District Attorney’s Office — including an FBI report and handwritten notes suggesting that the bullet wound in Kinser’s skull was too small to have been caused by a .25-caliber bullet. That revelation undermined the entire prosecution theory.
In August 2025, Judge Jonathan Grine of the Centre County Court of Common Pleas ruled that the concealed evidence represented a constitutional violation of due process. “Had that evidence been available at the time,” Grine wrote, “there would have been a reasonable probability that the jury’s judgment would have been affected.” One month later, District Attorney Bernie Cantorna dismissed the murder charge, saying a retrial would be both impossible and unjust.
By then, Subu had become the longest-serving exoneree in Pennsylvania history — and one of the longest-serving in the United States. Freedom, however, came with a new peril. ICE cited a “legacy deportation order” dating back to the 1980s, tied not only to the murder charge but also to an earlier drug conviction from Subu’s youth.
Before his arrest for murder, he had pleaded guilty at age 19 to intent to distribute LSD — a charge his family describes as a youthful mistake. Although that conviction carried its own immigration consequences, Subu, who was born in India but arrived in the United States when he was 9 months old, was never deported because he was serving a life sentence. Now, after his exoneration, ICE has revived the decades-old order.
What the hell have we become? My God.
This man is 64 years old and has not been to India since he was 9. He was wrongfully imprisoned for 42 years and now they want to send him back because of a minor infraction when he was 19 — before we imprisoned him for a crime he didn’t commit.
Joe Rogan has been saying that people who have a heart will not stand for all the cruelty but as the saying goes, that’s the point. Maybe someone should tell him about this one.
Update — Get a load of this. Kilmar Obrego Garcia is still in limbo and appearing in court everyone other day while the government insists that he has to be deported. The latest:
For weeks, Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who is married to a U.S. citizen, has made clear that he would not challenge his deportation if he were sent to Costa Rica, which has promised him legal residency and guaranteed that he would not be sent back to El Salvador.
But the Trump administration has refused to deport him to Costa Rica, and in an earlier hearing this week, Judge Xinis pressed the administration to consider the option or clarify why it was unacceptable.
She did not get the clarity she was seeking. Mr. Schultz not only could not explain why the administration had refused to consider Costa Rica but also said he had been unaware that Costa Rica had provided such assurances to Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Bullshit. They just want to send him someplace where he will be a total fish out of water with no way to make a living and where he might be tortured or sent back to El Salvador, which is what they really want.
Government officials had presented Eswatini, a tiny nation in southern Africa, as the leading option for Mr. Abrego Garcia at a hearing on Monday. But Mr. Schultz said the State Department requested that Eswatini take Mr. Abrego Garcia on Wednesday, two days later. Mr. Schultz learned a few hours before the hearing on Friday that Eswatini had refused, he said.
There was also discussion of Ghana at the hearing, but Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s foreign minister, said on social media on Friday that the country was “not accepting Abrego Garcia,” a position that he said the Ghanian government “directly and unambiguously conveyed to U.S. authorities.” Mr. Abrego Garcia objected to being deported to Uganda, expressing fear for his safety in the country, an argument that Trump officials have yet to challenge.
Why not North Korea? I’m sure Kim would be happy to do Trump a solid.