By Janhvi Ahuja
Amritsar witnessed a rather deary visitor from the skies as a US military aircraft carrying around a 100 Indian nationals or illegal immigrants as they are deemed to be, entered the state of Punjab.
This defence aircraft is said to have left the state of Texas on Tuesday and has now landed in Amritsar leaving the authorities working endlessly to process all the deportees. This initiative was taken by President Donald Trump when he decided to begin the mass deportation process of unregistered and undocumented foreign nationals.
According to the new laws and regulations, this step is a key policy. The United States is said to have identified around 18,000 Indians who have allegedly entered the country through illegal means.
There are 104 deportees aboard the flight from Texas. The authorities stated that they will be processed separately, and swift arrangements will be made for them to be put on buses and sent back to their home states, including Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, and Uttar Pradesh.
To send the deportees back to their respective countries, Trump has been using an increasing number of military aircraft and flights.. However, we must keep in mind that this is not the first incident of India welcoming its foreign nationals. In the United States’ Fiscal Year of 2024, 1,000 Indian immigrants and more were sent to the country through commercial and charter planes. This was after the Fiscal Year session which ended in September.
In addition, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported over a hundred Indian nationals in October. These immigrants were sent to India as they did not have any legal grounds to further their stay in America. They were also deported through a chartered flight.
Royce Bernstein Murray, an assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, said, ‘This is part of a steady increase in the removal of Indian nationals from the US in recent years, which corresponds with a general rise in encounters with Indian nationals.”
It is safe to decipher that most of the deportation of the Indian nationals along with their initial migration from India to the US happens from the state of Punjab and Haryana. Another prominent source of origin is Modi’s home state of Gujarat.
The latest statistics dictate that around 5,477 Indian nationals have been deported by ICE between the years of 2018 and 2023. A significant number was noted during the Covid 19 pandemic when around 2,300 Indians were deported from the United States of America.