A hundred migrants from India were returned to their country in the first deportation flight from the US, days before the visit of Indian Premier Narendra Modi to Washington.
A United States military plane that transported 104 deported Indian migrants arrived on Wednesday in a city in northern India, on the first flight of this type to the country as part of a campaign ordered by the Donald Trump government, airport officials reported .
The Indians who returned home had irregularly entered the US over the years and came from several Indian states.
The flight occurred before the trip to Washington of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, which is expected for next week. Trump and Modi talked about immigration in a phone call last week and Trump stressed the importance of India Buy more security equipment made in the United States and requested a fair bilateral trade.
India has cooperated with the United States and said she is willing to accept other deported Indians after verification.
Nueva Delhi says that it is against irregular immigration, mainly because it is linked to several forms of organized crime, and has not opposed that the United States sport to its citizens.
“For the Indians, not only in the United States but anywhere in the world, if they are Indian citizens and are exceeding their stay or are in a given country without adequate documentation, we will receive them back, provided that documents are shared with us to that we can verify their nationality and that they are indeed Indians, ”said the spokesman of the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs last month, Randhir Jaiswal.
“If that is the case, then we will continue. We will facilitate the return to India, ”said Jaiswal.
The United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said at the beginning of this week that deportation flights were an effective way to curb the irregular migration flow, which he described as destructive and destabilizing.
The State Department said that these deportations send a disjection message to other people who consider migrating without legal authorization.
The Indian Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, informed the Indian Parliament that 519 Indian citizens were deported to India between November 2023 and October 2024, citing data from the United States government.
The United States government deports through commercial and leased flights, he added.
According to media reports, there are about 725,000 Indians living in the United States without residence permit, mainly from the states of Punjab and Gujarat, and the Indians accounted for approximately 3 % of the illegal border crosses in the United States in 2024.
The Indian Express newspaper said that in November last year there were 20,407 Indians without residence permission who faced final expulsion orders or were in detention centers of the United States immigration and customs control service (ICE, in English).