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U.S. to Deport Exonerated Prisoner Held 43 Years for Crime He Did Not Commit

HeadlineOct 16, 2025
Image Credit: Abby Drey via Getty Images

In immigration news, the Trump administration is preparing to deport a man arrested by ICE on the same day he was freed from a Pennsylvania prison, after serving 43 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. On October 3, 64-year-old Subramanyam Vedam walked free from Huntingdon State Correctional Institution, where he’d been held for over four decades, after his conviction for a 1982 murder was vacated. His freedom came three years after the Pennsylvania Innocence Project uncovered evidence that prosecutors had buried an FBI report that would have exonerated him. He was immediately arrested by ICE agents acting on a decades-old deportation order. He’s now being held at an ICE jail in central Pennsylvania and set to be deported to India. Vedam’s niece told the Miami Herald, “He left India when he was nine months old. … He hasn’t been there for over 44 years, and the people he knew when he went as a child have passed away. His whole family — his sister, his nieces, his grand-nieces — we’re all U.S. citizens, and we all live here.”

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