New Delhi, India – Kulvinder Kaur had tried and tried again to call her husband in the United States. After two weeks of the connection not going through, she was consumed by anxiety, she said from her home in Hoshiarpur, in the northern Indian state of Punjab.
“I was really afraid about what might have happened to him – if he was robbed or killed there. He is father of my children and I was afraid if I would ever see him again,” Kaur said.
Then, she saw a news telecast: President Donald Trump’s administration was deporting batches of illegal Indian immigrants.
Her husband, Harvinder Singh, 40, was among the 104 Indians who had entered the US illegally over the last few years, who were deported by the authorities on Wednesday as Trump doubled down on a key election pledge that drove him back into power in January.
Singh had made a desperate journey through jungles, crossing rivers and seas, to the US, in search of a better life for his family back in Punjab. This week, like many other detainees, including women, Singh had his hands and legs cuffed during the 40-hour journey to Amritsar, a city in northern India.
The visuals of Indian citizens – shackled in chains – parading towards a US military aircraft, for its farthest-ever journey as a deportation flight, have prompted anger in India. On Thursday, hours after the deportees landed, opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party, staged a protest wearing handcuffs outside the parliament in New Delhi.
Days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s scheduled visit to the White House on February 13, the outrage over the treatment of Indian nationals by US authorities is also laced with a question about Modi’s bromance with Trump. If Trump is indeed Modi’s friend, as both leaders claim, why isn’t New Delhi able to stop him from steps that could complicate ties?
The answer, say experts, is a difficult balancing act that the Modi government believes it must manage.
“The issue with the Trump administration is there are a number of issues on the table, including tariffs,” said Harsh Pant, a geopolitics analyst at New Delhi-based think tank, Observer Research Foundation, referring to Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Indian imports. “So, where do you give in and where do you negotiate?
“In order to make Trump happy, who is transactional by nature, India does not want to raise the stakes too much [on the immigration issue] and is absorbing the costs,” Pant told Al Jazeera. “There are other challenges as well to face.”
‘Crass side of America’
After Trump declared a national emergency on immigration, his administration started military flights to deport undocumented migrants. The US authorities have sent at least six planeloads of immigrants to Latin America, prompting tensions with Colombia and Brazil. The government of Brazil protested against the “degrading treatment of passengers on the flight”, after it emerged that its nationals were chained and handcuffed while being deported.
India though, has not said it has protested similar treatment meted out to its nationals. Of the 104 Indians on the plane that landed on Wednesday, several were children – they, however, are not known to have been shackled.
As of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, among countries with the largest number of undocumented immigrants – 725,000 – living in the US.
US Border Patrol chief, Michael Banks, wrote on X that the authorities “successfully returned illegal aliens to India”, captioning a video showing shackled men being led into the military plane: “If you cross illegally, you will be removed.”
Anil Trigunayat, a former Indian diplomat who has served in the US, told Al Jazeera that the “treatment with Indian nationals, dragging them like criminals like this is unprecedented” in his experience.
“Handcuffing and those kinds of things are inhuman essentially. They have shown a very crass side of the American establishment,” said Trigunayat. “This is crass language. And absolutely unjustified and unnecessary.”
‘She was shackled in chains’
After an uproar by opposition leaders in both houses of parliament on Thursday, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told parliament that the government was working with the Trump administration to ensure that Indian citizens are not mistreated while being deported.
Jaishankar also noted in the address that the US’s operating procedure had allowed the “use of restraints” while deporting since 2012 and added “there has been no change from past procedure.”
He also shared government data from 2009 on the deportees, touching a high of 2042 in 2019, before falling marginally again. Last year, 1368 undocumented Indian immigrants were deported by the US authorities.
He added that New Delhi was told by the US that women and children were not restrained and their demands during transit, including food, medical attention, and toilet breaks, were attended to.
That wasn’t the experience of Khusboo Patel, a 35-year-old from Modi’s home state in Gujarat, on the 40-hour journey back home, her family said.
“She was shackled in chains her whole journey, strictly restricted to her seat,” her elder brother, Varun Patel, told Al Jazeera from his home in Vadodara, a city in eastern Gujarat.
Khusboo had been in the US barely for a month when she was detained by the authorities. “We were not aware of her whereabouts and it made us anxious,” Patel, the brother, said. The family learned about Khusboo’s return when local media reached out inquiring about their home.
“She told us that they were brought in like prisoners and criminals,” he said. “Nobody harmed her but it was a horrifying experience.”
Patel said he was disappointed in the Modi government’s failure to “secure a dignified return of our citizens”.
“What can they do for us now? That time is gone. Our government enabled this mistreatment.”
Shattered dreams
Back at home in Hoshiarpur, Singh and Kaur are now worried about how they’ll recover the debt of more than $55,000 owed to friends, a local bank and small-time lenders that they incurred to pay off agents in a bid to get Singh into the US. The couple, parents to two children, sold their farmland – but it wasn’t enough. Not by a distance.
“We were cheated by our agent who left my husband going from one place to another,” Kaur, 35, told Al Jazeera.
Talking in a muffled voice, Kaur said she felt gutted when she saw the immigrants shackled in cuffs. “I’m satisfied that my husband is at home with me now,” she said. “But now we are worried about the huge debt we are under. How will we ever recover that money?”
Vinod Kumar, head of the sociology department at Panjab University, Chandigarh, said thousands of youth continue to sell their belongings and take up risky, so-called dunki routes in search of a better life. “With deportation, they have finished their career at both, home and abroad,” he said, adding that a majority of deportees come from lower-income families.
“Earlier, this trend was limited to Punjab, Gujarat, or to some states in [southern India],” said Kumar, who specialises in diaspora politics. Now it’s expanding to other parts of India.
Singh and the others on the plane with him are back where they left.
“They need to restart from scratch now,” said Kumar.
