NEW DELHI: India has identified 388 illegal Indian immigrants in the US since President Donald Trump launched his mass deportation campaign and all of them have returned to their home country, TOI has learnt. These include the plane-loads of illegals who landed in Amritsar and those who returned from third countries, mostly Panama, with help from the International Organisation for Migration.
Verification of nationality is an ongoing process, and more are expected to be deported sooner than later, but not before their nationality is confirmed like in the past. For India, whether it’s a million or a few thousand, there’s no way of knowing conclusively how many Indians are living illegally in the US as they become Indian only after verification.
While extremely large figures – ranging from 200,000 to 700,000 – have been bandied around about the number of Indian illegals in the US, the govt has maintained it has no data about the number of “undocumented” Indian immigrants residing in the US. “The reason is that these immigrants have legally exited India but have either overstayed their US visa validity or have entered the US illegally or without valid documents,” said junior external affairs minister Kirti Vardhan Singh, responding to a written question in RS earlier.
Various Indian agencies closely scrutinise the list of persons identified for deportation by the US and only those who have been verified to be Indian nationals are accepted for deportation. Foreign minister S Jaishankar had said in his statement in Parliament that it is the obligation of all countries to accept their nationals living abroad illegally but it is subject to an “unambiguous” verification of their nationality. India has been accepting deportees from the US for the past couple of decades, with the maximum number (2,042) in 2019. Last year, it took back 1,368 illegal Indians.
For the Indian govt, the real issue remains the need for a crackdown on what Jaishankar had described in his statement in Parliament last month as the illegal migration industry. He had said that law enforcement agencies will take action against agents facilitating illegal migration.