US military plane carrying 104 illegal Indian immigrants lands in Amritsar

Opposition parties allege that the deportees were handcuffed and humiliated

A US military aircraft carrying 104 “illegal” Indian immigrants landed at Shri Guru Ramdas Ji International Airport in Amritsar on Wednesday, as President Donald Trump’s administration upped the ante over the immigration issue.

 

According to news agency PTI, 30 of the deportees are from Punjab, 33 each from Haryana and Gujarat, three each from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, and two from Chandigarh.

 

Opposition parties alleged that the deportees were “handcuffed” and “humiliated”. However, Congress Lok Sabha member Shashi Tharoor, who heads the parliamentary standing committee on external affairs, said the US was entitled to send illegal immigrants back, but his only problem with the deportation was that they were sent back in a military aircraft.

 

The Tharoor-led committee held a meeting on Tuesday where the issue of deportation was discussed. Later in a series of posts on X, he pointed out that there were 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants in the US, the third-largest group after Mexico and El Salvador. "Since October 2020, US Customs and Border Protection officials have detained nearly 170,000 Indian migrants attempting to cross the border illegally from either Canada or Mexico. They are all subject to deportation," Tharoor said.

 

Punjab’s NRI Affairs minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, who received the deportees, said 30 of the 104 were from Punjab. “All are healthy and okay. It was a long flight. They had their meal,” he said, adding that the authorities first completed the immigration process of those from Punjab, and then from Haryana, Gujarat, and other states. He urged the Centre to resolve the issue with the US.

 

Dhaliwal said he met some youths from Punjab and asked them about travel agents who sent them to the US. "Most of them have said that the agents were from Dubai and they spoke to them over the phone. I feel bad for some people who had Canadian visas and visas for other countries. But their work got spoiled when they reached there (US)," the minister said.

 

Earlier, some reports claimed that US military plane C-17 was bringing back 205 illegal immigrants. The flight landed at 1.55 pm amid tight security outside the airport. According to the sources, the deportees are expected to be allowed to go home following verification and background checks. Police will focus on identifying any deportee with a criminal record, they said.

 

The North American Punjabi Association (NAPA) on Wednesday urged the Punjab government to establish a rehabilitation fund to support young boys and girls deported from the United States.