A US military aircraft transporting 104 deported illegal Indian migrants landed on Wednesday in the north Indian city of Amritsar. It was the farthermost destination so far of all such flights undertaken by the US President Donald Trump’s administration to repatriate undocumented settlers.
Security officials in New Delhi said the deportees, who boarded the C-17 Globemaster transporter at a US air force base in San Antonio, Texas, following confirmation of their nationality by local Indian embassy officials, included 25 women and 13 minors.
They said the bulk of the returning migrants, who were apprehended from the US-Mexico border, originated in the northern states of Punjab – where Amritsar is located – neighbouring Haryana and prime minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat.
None were detained and all were in the process of returning home.
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Mr Modi is scheduled to meet Mr Trump in Washington on February 13th, following an invitation by the US president after both leaders spoke last week and discussed immigration issues and equitable trading ties.
The US immigration authorities are believed to have identified 18,000 undocumented Indian migrants from an overall total of about 725,000 – the third largest group after Mexico and El Salvador – for imminent deportation. India has, in principle, agreed to take them all back.
“We have always taken the view that if there are any of our citizens not in the US legally, then we have always been open to their legitimate return,” India’s foreign minister Subramaniam Jaishankar told reporters in Washington last month.
Until September 2024, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deported some 1,000 undocumented Indian nationals on charter and commercial flights, followed by another 100 the following month, but their return had prompted little or no publicity.
Indian diplomats and security officials are believed to have persuaded their US counterparts not to make the latest deportations a high-visibility spectacle, as it would politically embarrass Mr Modi’s government.
“This accounted for the secrecy surrounding the deportations, as opposed to those to Latin American countries,” said a senior diplomat in Delhi, declining to be identified, as he was not authorised to comment on the matter.
He said Mr Modi had recently intimated his government’s willingness to work closely with the US to identify undocumented Indian immigrants to protect others, such as AI and other high-tech professionals, seeking to legally enter the US.
It was also an attempt, he added, to placate the Trump administration on its primary deportation policy front, to try to avoid the imposition of trade tariffs on India.
Almost all the returning deportees had fled spiralling unemployment at home via an established network of migration scams.
Known locally as the “donkey route”, it is operated by criminal syndicates and offers illegal entry into the US and Europe at great expense by travelling through multiple countries, often through risky terrain, using fake documents and bribery at border crossings.
And while some are successful, a large number face arrest, deportation and even death.
Four illegal migrants from Gujarat froze to death on the Canadian border while attempting to enter the US last November.
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