Costliest deportation: Mixed reactions to return of 104 Indians from US

President Donald Trump’s government cracked down hard on illegal migrants, spending $1 billion to deport 104 Indians back to India on a military flight that landed in Amritsar on 5th February, 2025.

This seems to be one of the most expensive deportation operations till date by the United States, each deportee’s deportation costs were up to $10,000 which is far more than what a typical plane ticket to the US would cost.

Videos released by the US Border Patrol on social media showed Indian nationals with shackles on their wrists and ankles and shuffling uncomfortably in a line like prisoners.

Watch | Handcuffed, starved for 40 hours: Why is India soft pedalling on US deportation row?

Political response

In response to these disturbing visuals, opposition party members reprimanded the ruling BJP government with Trinamool MP Sakhet Gokhale taking to social media with a statement that asked why the current government is unable to bring back Indian citizens with dignity.

Lok Sabha MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and many other opposition MPs held up placards outside the Parliament on 6th February, 2025. Demanding justice for the deported Indians, she questioned the necessity of sending Indian nationals back in shackles and treating them inhumanely.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor had a different take in the same line of thought where he expressed that the US has a right to deport those who enter it illegally and those identified as Indian should be accepted by the Indian government, however, the harsh manner in which the Indian deportees were sent back is unnecessary and their reasoning for protesting was against the manner of how they were treated by the US government and its immigration authorities.

Also read | Illegals deportation | Why India cannot hold on to her people

What Jaishankar said

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that the US's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement authorities (ICE) were in charge of the deportation processes, which according to him have been effective since 2012. While the detainees, as per ICE procedures, were to be in restraints barring women and children - the accounts by the Indians who underwent this harrowing ordeal state otherwise, that everyone else except for children were in restraints regardless of gender.

According to a report by the Economic Times, Muskan was one of the deportees who was arrested near Tijuana by the California Police Department. Her father stated that she and other deportees were handcuffed and were not unrestrained even when they had to use the washroom.

The families of the affected individuals who were deported back to India expressed mixed reactions. Some have accepted the need to have been deported after illegally entering the country and others are horrified and expressed their grievances towards travel agencies that lied to clients and forcefully made them take the treacherous ‘donkey route’ despite paying several lakhs for a legal route to the US.

Also read | Cast off by US, 33 Gujaratis will now be haunted by crushed dreams, hefty loans

This situation exhibits a concerning trend in the rise of illegal migration of Indian nationals to other countries and requires a much deeper study of domestic policies and rising unemployment rates that are pushing people to seek dangerous routes to emigrate abroad for a better life.