Deportation row in Parliament: ‘No women or children were restrained,’ govt cites US response

The Indian government on Friday told the Parliament that the US has confirmed that Indian deportees who were women or children were “not restrained” on their flights back home last month.

The central government informed the upper house of the parliament that the Ministry of External Affairs had “strongly registered its concerns with the US authorities on the treatment meted out to deportees on the flight that landed on February 5, particularly for the use of shackles, especially on women".

In response, Washington assured that “no women or children were restrained on the deportation flights that landed in India on February 15 and 16 respectively.”

Since January, a total of 388 Indian deportees have arrived in the country till date after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing all illegal immigrants to leave the country immediately.

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The government was responding to questions put forth by Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas, who sought information on whether the government had asked the US administration not to handcuff or shackle them.

“The US ICE authorities organise and execute deportations as per the Standard Operating Procedure, effective from November 2012, which provides for the use of restraints on deportees. The US side has mentioned that restraints are used to ensure the safety and security of deportation missions on both chartered civilian aircraft as well as military aircraft. While women and minors are generally not shackled, the flight officer in charge of a deportation flight has the final say on the matter," the government said.

It added that there is currently no information on the number of illegal immigrants in the US holding an Indian passport.

Last month, a US military aeroplane carrying 104 deported Indians landed in the country. A C-17 military aircraft transported the first group of deportees from San Antonio, Texas, to Amritsar.

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According to data from the Pew Research Center, approximately 725,000 undocumented Indian immigrants reside in the U.S., ranking them as the third-largest group after Mexicans and Salvadorans. However, these figures are contested. The Migration Policy Institute, on the other hand, estimates the number to be around half of that.