When a military transport plane carrying deportees landed at Amritsar’s Sri Guru Ram Das Jee International Airport on Wednesday, it marked the second occasion since 2020 when the US deported Indians.
In 2020 too, 167 illegal immigrants were sent back by the Donald Trump administration.
As soon as Trump assumed the charge of the US President last month after returning to power post a gap of four years, he had ordered a crackdown against illegal immigrants.
In 2020, in the wake of the Covid-19 threat, a special high-risk charter (SHRC) mission was conducted by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to remove illegal migrants, mostly in their 20s and 30s.
On May 19, 2020, the chartered flight run by the ICE air operations had arrived with, including 79 from Haryana, 67 from Punjab, eight from Gujarat, three each from Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, and two each from Kerala and Telangana.
As the deportees disembarked, they were shifted to high-security area, where medical teams conducted their screening, though they all possessed reports of their Covid-19 test, which was conducted in the US.
It was believed that they had sneaked into Texas, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Washington and Atlanta illegally, but later nabbed. A total of 1,793 illegal immigrants from India were then arrested by the ICE. They were lodged in 95 detention centres in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco. Reports suggested that most of them had sought asylum on the pretext of atrocities and persecution in their native places.
