Gujarat: Ordeal for US deportees continues, police grilling leaves them in despair

Police seek documents

Unlike what was assured, they say they are not given time to recover from their trauma and the intense police grilling is taking a toll on their mental health.

The police team wants to verify their passports, visas and other documents like Aadhar or school leaving certificate, birth certificate etc. which they may have used to get passports. Worse, they also have to travel all the way from their districts to Ahmedabad, standing for hours at the police headquarters.

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

No empathy; police in a hurry

Earlier, on February 7, when the flight carrying the 33 Gujarati deportees, which included teary-eyed women and children, landed in Ahmedabad, the Gujarat police had issued a release promising to deal with the deportees with “sensitivity and empathy”.

Notably, only last week, Vikas Sahay, the DGP of Gujarat, met the Superintendents of Police (SPs) of the home districts to which these 33 US deportees belong. He had asked them to conduct a probe into the illegal immigration process but to do it only after the deportees recovered from the trauma. But that was not to be.

In less than a week, the deportees were summoned to the police headquarters in Ahmedabad, adding to the agony.

'Not even in a week given'

“We were told on the day we landed that the respective SPs in our districts may call us. We were assured that the (police) are empathetic about our plight. But police did not even let us be in peace for a week before they called us all the way from our homes to Ahmedabad,” a 32-year-old deportee told The Federal, seeking anonymity.

According to him, he and his wife were held separately in the US since they had split up men and women. “As we were going to board the flight, I caught a glimpse of her face as we were made to stand in queue. We were made to sit separately on our way back, though I requested that the officials let us be together. My wife kept crying. She has not been well since we landed in Ahmedabad. We need rest to recuperate mentally and physically,” said the deportee, who hails from the Mehsana district in north Gujarat.

'Not a criminal, but treated like one here and there'

Another deportee, a tearful Khusbhu Patel, stood quietly in a corner of the police headquarters with a mask on her face, along with her elder brother, who accompanied her. They are residents of Luna village in Vadodara and since other deportees already occupied the three benches, they were forced to stand for hours waiting for the police to call them.

Her brother Dhruv Patel, 29, said, “My sister was handcuffed during the deportation. She had gone to the US on a tourist visa and we don’t know why she was deported like this. She has also been subjected to immense social scrutiny since returning. The police calling her back for interrogation makes the situation worse for her.”

Further, he asserted, “She is not a criminal but first in the US, and now our own state police are treating her like one."

According to Gujarat police, of the 33 deportees, 18 were held by American police just as Donald Trump was taking oath as US President on January 20. Of them, 17 are from Mehsana, who crossed the Mexico border on January 19 and walked straight into the hands of US officials, while Khushbu Patel, who landed in New York on January 19, was picked up from her hotel the next day.

Patel told The Federal that she landed in the US on a tourist visa on January 19, 2025, and on January 20, she was picked up by the US officials from her hotel. “Even the state police knows that she was not caught crossing international borders yet they would not bother,” Patel said angrily.

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

'Irregular ways and means'

The police, meanwhile, seem intent on finding out the “irregular ways” and “illegal documents” used by these deportees to illegally enter the US.

R D Oza, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad told The Federal, “There are two parts to this case but only the first part concerns us. The deportees used irregular ways to get passport and visas to the intermediate countries that were issued from Gujarat. We will investigate this. Later, they got illegal documents from these countries to finally land in the United States as illegal immigrants.”

Oza is one of the officers grilling the deportees as part of the investigation.

Noticeably, earlier, the police had stated that most of the agents had gone underground and shut their shops ever since the news of the immigrants being deported emerged.

Parikshita Rathod, DIG CID (Crime) is probing multiple similar illegal immigrant cases after the death of a family of four from Dingucha in Mehsana in 2022, who froze to death on the US-Canada border.

“The deportees are too scattered across the state and not part of the same modus operandi. They are handled by different agents who make arrangements for them to cross over to the US from different places and different times. So, the FIRs, if needed, will be filed by the district police, but the probe into the entire matter will be centered at the Ahmedabad police headquarters,” said Rathod.

She said the individual deportees had been asked to share documents with which they applied for visas to the intermediate countries. After this, their statements would be recorded.

“The trail of documents used to reach their destination and the intermediate countries will be the subject of the probe for now,” she added.

As the Gujarat police seem hell-bent on uncovering the illegal immigrants’ trail to the US, trials and tribulations continue for Indian deportees even after coming back home.