Nearly a week before their children’s school broke for winter vacations, Omi Devi and Paramjeet Singh began packing. There was a lot for them to sort out before they made their big move to the United States. Their farm had to be taken care of — Omi’s brother Rajesh Kumar had promised that he would see to it. Their house in Kurukshetra, Haryana, had to be emptied, since no one was going to be staying there for a while.
“The farm was enough for our two families. The children were in a private school. But Omi and Paramjeet felt that a little more money would help them,” says Rajesh. “Their oldest daughter, 20, is already in California on a student visa. Obviously, it would be an added bonus for them if one more child found a future there.”
On December 21, 2024, the family of four flew out of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi with two large suitcases and four backpacks. Their first stop was Paris and their final destination was California on the western coast of the U.S. For the move, Omi and Paramjeet had borrowed ₹1.25 crore from family members.
However, it was only on January 23, 2025, that Omi and Paramjeet and their children stepped into California, not past immigration, but through a hole cut into the border wall between Mexico and the U.S. near Tijuana. Within hours, they were in shackles and within days, they were on a military plane back to India.
The four of them were among the 104 Indians, including 19 women and 13 minors, who were deported by the U.S. after they were caught entering the country illegally. Their journey back to Amritsar, Punjab, took 40 hours. Multiple deportees who spoke to The Hindu since they landed on February 5 say their wrists and ankles were shackled throughout the journey. The children, too, were restrained.
In the early hours of February 6, more than 12 hours after they landed in Amritsar, the family returned to Kurukshetra, escorted by the police. They did not move into their house. Instead, Rajesh rented a place for them for the time being in Kurukshetra. Omi and the children were running a fever.
Before they had left, Omi’s children had told their closest friends in middle school that the family was moving. Their friends had come to the airport to say goodbye. “I never thought that the children would be this heartbroken,” says Rajesh. “They are nervous about going back to school.”
But Rajesh is tenacious. “A dream has been shattered but this is not the end for us,” he says.
A treacherous journey
Omi and Paramjeet’s family are among the hundreds of thousands of Indians who undertake treacherous journeys, popularly called “donkey routes” in Haryana and Punjab, to make it to the U.S. To reach their destination, they often cross rivers in rickety boats, climb mountains, and trudge across deserts and forests. Many of them die on the way. Most of them have agents who connect the migrants with ‘donkers’, or people smugglers. ‘Donkers’ in the transit country help them enter their final destination illegally.
According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the share of the “unauthorised Indian migrant population” has been increasing steadily from 1990 onwards. It peaked at 5.6 lakh in 2016 before sharply declining to 2.2 lakh in the 2022 estimates. However, in 2023, data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nationwide Encounters shows that the number of Indians apprehended by border patrol forces had increased to 43,000 from around 18,000 the previous year. In 2024, this number came down slightly to 40,000.
While illegal immigration has been a point of political concern and a matter of public debate in the U.S. for many decades, it is more pronounced now. During the U.S. presidential election campaign last year, Donald Trump’s tough-on-immigration policies resonated with voters. He was sworn in on January 20, 2025. It was around this time that most of the Indians in the first batch of deportees say they had crossed the south-western border of the U.S. on foot.
The moment Omi and her family landed in Paris, they found that one of their suitcases was missing. There was no time to recover it before moving on to Italy, their next leg. From Italy, their agent had promised to put them on a small aircraft with 15-20 others to the U.S. with a stopover in Costa Rica. “But the flight did not get clearance to land in Costa Rica and landed in El Salvador instead,” Rajesh says, adding that they lost their second suitcase there. Omi and her family were informed that from El Salvador, they were on their own to the Tijuana border.
Robin Handa, 18, is another of the deportees. Robin says his father, a electrician, took a loan of ₹30 lakh to send him to the U.S. after Robin completed a course in Computer Science from the Industrial Training Institute in Ambala, Haryana. “My father put together his savings of over ₹15 lakh after selling land and took a loan of ₹30 lakh to pay an agent who had promised to send me to the U.S. via the U.K.,” he says.
Robin says he made the “expensive” journey to the U.S. only after he realised that there were neither any jobs for him in his home town, nor any prospects of making a decent living.
Robin’s agent instructed him to board a flight to Guyana from Mumbai on July 24, 2024. “Then, unlike what he had promised, I was taken to Brazil. First, I travelled some distance by foot along with 30 others, including Indians, Nepalis, and Bangladeshis. Then we crossed seas on small boats and waded through rivers. Then we traversed the Amazon jungles to reach Peru, Ecuador, and finally Colombia. From there, I went to the U.S.-Mexico border. I was arrested from there on January 22,” he says.
While his agent had promised Robin that he would reach his destination in a month through the “donkey route”, Robin says it took him nearly six months. He spent many of these months without proper food. “Anyone who fell sick would be left behind to fend for themselves,” he recalls.
Jaspal Singh entered California through the Tijuana border crossing on January 22. He is seen here at his home in Fatehgarh Churian town in Gurdaspur district, Punjab.
| Photo Credit:
Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
Jaspal Singh, 36, from Punjab’s border district of Gurdaspur, entered California through the Tijuana border crossing on January 22, a day before Omi and her family crossed over with their children. But his journey began more than two years ago. “I had arranged for the ₹40 lakh that my agent had asked for, and left Delhi in February 2022. I flew to London on a tourist visa. The agent said I would have to wait there until he could get the paperwork done to get me into the U.S. I kept waiting. I found a dormitory and spent two years doing construction work,” he says.
Jaspal says he was even able to send money home: “You know how much daily labour charges are here? ₹500 a day. Do you know how much I made there? At least £70 (around ₹7,600).”
Meanwhile, Jaspal would call his agent every day to check on the progress of his U.S. paperwork. “I have my heavy vehicle drivers’ licence. I have studied only till Class 10. I just wanted to go to the U.S. and drive trucks. What’s wrong in wanting to seek a better life,” he asks.
After two years in London, Jaspal went to Barcelona, where he believed his agent was staying. “I kept speaking to him on the phone, but he would not meet me. A few days later, he finally put me on a flight to Brazil, saying the people there would sort out my paperwork.”
After running from pillar to post in Brazil, Jaspal was told that he would have to make his way to the Mexico-U.S. border by road from Brazil. “There were about a dozen people with me. We travelled by bus, taxi, and walked for days on end. We walked a lot in Panama,” he recalls.
Within hours of reaching California, Jaspal was arrested by uniformed officers, shoved into a bus, and sent to a camp in San Diego. “They took all our belongings except for the clothes on our backs. During the day, we ate biscuits, fruit, and chips. At night we would get bread,” he says.
After 10 days in the camp, Omi’s family, Jaspal, and other Indian deportees were shackled and put on a bus to the air strip. There, they boarded a military aircraft. “Throughout the journey, there were perhaps two instances when our handcuffs were removed,” recalls Omi.
Jaspal says everyone near him on the flight was crying. No one knew where exactly they were going. “About 6-7 hours into the flight, I asked the security personnel where we were headed. He said, ‘India’. I asked where in India. He said, ‘I don’t know,’” he says.
Robin is upset. “I did all this only to be chained like an animal and brought back to the country,” he says. He is also angry with the way the deportees were treated. “The women and children were also handcuffed and their legs tied with ropes,” he says.
Of apps and phones
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world, the number of asylum requests in the U.S. from Indian nationals rose from about 6,000 in 2020 to 51,000 in 2023. According to data cited in a 2025 Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies paper, 66% of asylum cases involving Indian nationals between 2001 and 2022 had been filed by Punjabi speakers. Of the 104 Indians deported by the U.S. last week, the highest number (33) was from Gujarat, 29 were from Punjab, and 33 from Haryana.
Within hours of being sworn in, Trump banned the Customs and Border Protection One mobile app that had been used to allow migrants to schedule appointments at eight southwest border ports of entry, requesting asylum.
For Indians taking the ‘donkey route’, downloading an app was never their first priority. They say their priority was to reset their phones to factory settings, destroy their SIM cards and, if possible, dispose of the phone. “The moment Omi’s family crossed into the U.S. on January 23, I was cut off from them,” says Rajesh.
Jaspal says the agents had made it clear to them that their phones should not help people figure out their identities.
‘Dreams are dreams’
The moment the deportees landed in Amritsar, they were fed “properly,” remembers Jaspal. The deportees were told at immigration to jot down whatever details they remembered of their respective agents. “It is impossible to remember their phone numbers. Also, it is not as if we have very good relationships with the agents,” he says.
The police have launched extensive operations to try and identify these agents and prosecute them. Both the Haryana and Punjab police have registered cases against travel agents who allegedly “duped” the deportees who landed in Amritsar last week.
Chained Indian illegal immigrants on their way to India. Photo: X/@USBPChief
“When we were being escorted back, I remember the Punjab police telling us that they would help us to the extent possible,” says Jaspal.
Rajesh says he is not surprised that the police have been willing to help identify these agents and recover money. “I know cops’ children who have taken the illegal route. They also want to find out who these agents are,” he says.
Jaspal has had enough for the time being. “I have lost everything. I can’t bring myself to think about retrying the trip,” he says.
However, Rajesh refuses to give up. “We were raised in the village. We don’t stop just because we failed once. The dream is alive,” he says.
Rajesh says he speaks not just for his family, but for most of his village. “It is not like our granaries are running empty,” he explains. “Even if we don’t do any work here in the village, we will survive; we have enough food. But is this enough? There are no jobs for us here and dreams are dreams.”
Rajesh says they see neighbours sending children abroad and showing off their money in the form of new cars. Pointing to a group of giggling children on their way home from school, he throws a challenge: “Do you want to check how many of them want to go to the U.S.?”
He has already sent his older son, 20, to Brampton in Canada, where he is studying management. His younger son, 16, is packed and ready to leave the minute his father will allow it. “Forget my son, I have been ready to go to the U.S. no matter what for years now,” Rajesh says. At 45, he has exhausted all his attempts at securing jobs in the Army and paramilitary forces. In addition to farming, he drives trucks for a living.
For now, Rajesh’s priority is to help get Omi and Paramjeet get back on their feet and ensure that Omi’s children are once again enrolled in school. One of the children needs to prepare to write the 10th Board examination this year. “But if we can arrange the money, I would go tomorrow to the U.S.,” he says.
abhinay.lakshman@thehindu.co.in
(With inputs from Alisha Dutta in Ambala, Haryana)
Published – February 15, 2025 03:29 am IST
