Yogita Limaye
Corresponding to South Asia and Afghanistan
Bbc
Gurpreet Singh hoped to enter the United States before the start of President Trump’s repression
Gurpreet Singh was handcuffed, his legs chained and a chain tied around his waist. He was led to the Tarmac in Texas by the American border patrol to a C-17 military transport aircraft.
It was February 3 and, after a trip of several months, he realized that his dream of living in America was over. He was expelled in India. “I felt like the ground was moving away from under my feet,” he said.
Gurpreet, 39, has been one of the thousands of Indians in recent years to have spent their savings and has gone through continents to illegally enter the United States through its southern border, while they were trying to escape an unemployment crisis at home.
According to the most recent figures in PEW, there are about 725,000 undenment undeniable undenials in the United States.
Now Gurpreet has become one of the first undocumented Indians to be sent home since President Donald Trump took office, with a promise to make mass deportations a priority.
Gurpreet intended to make an asylum complaint based on threats he had said to have received in India, but – in accordance with a Trump decree to divert people without granting them asylum hearings – he said he had been returned without his case being considered.
About 3,700 Indians were returned to charter and commercial flights during the mandate of President Biden, but the recent images of prisoners in the channels under the Trump administration aroused indignation in India.
Us Border Patrol has published the images in an online video with an explosive choir soundtrack and the warning: “If you cross illegally, you will be deleted.”
American border force
A video showing the migrants chained deported triggered the indignation in the home of Gurpreet in India
“We sat in handcuffs and chains for more than 40 hours. Even women were linked in the same way. Only children were free,” Gurpreet told BBC in India. “We were not allowed to get up. If we wanted to use the toilets, we were escorted by American forces, and only one of our handcuffs was removed.”
The opposition parties protested in Parliament, saying that the Indian deportees had received “inhuman and degrading treatment”. “There are a lot of discussions on how Prime Minister Modi and Mr. Trump are good friends. So why did Mr. Moda allow this?” said Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, a key opposition leader.
Gurpreet said: “The Indian government should have said something on our behalf. They should have said in the United States to expulsion as was done before, without handcuffs and chains.”
A spokesperson for the Indian Foreign Ministry said that the government had raised these concerns with the United States and that consequently, on subsequent flights, deported women were not handcuffed and chained.
But on the ground, the intimidating images and the rhetoric of President Trump seem to have the desired effect.
“No one will try to go to the United States now thanks to this illegal” Donkey “route while Trump is in power,” said Gurpreet.
In the longer term, it could depend on the continuous expulsion, but for the moment, many Indians, called locally, have been devoted to the hiding place, fearing the raids against them by the Indian police.
Gurpreet said that the Indian authorities demanded the number of agent he had used when he returned home, but that the smuggler could no longer be joined.
“I don’t blame them, however. We are thirsty and went to the well. They did not come to see us,” said Gurpreet.
Although the official figure does not put the unemployment rate at only 3.2%, it hides a more precarious image for many Indians. Only 22% of workers have regular wages, the majority are self -employed workers and almost a fifth are “unpaid aid”, including women working in family businesses.
“We leave India only because we are forced to do so. If I get a job that even paid me 30,000 rupees (£ 270 / $ 340) per month, my family would get away. I would never have thought about,” said Gurpreet, who has a woman, a mother and an 18 -month -old baby to take care.
“You can say what you want on the economy on paper, but you have to see reality in the field. There is no opportunity for us to work or manage a business.”
Getty images
The military plane carrying the first expelled migrants landed in India last month
The Gupreet Caminning Company was one of the small businesses dependent on the cash flow that has been seriously struck when the Indian government withdrew 86% of the currency in circulation with a four -hour notice. He said he had not been paid by his customers and had no money to keep the business afloat. Another small business he has created, managing logistics for other companies, has also failed due to cocvid locking, he said.
He said he had tried to get visas to go to Canada and the United Kingdom, but his requests were rejected.
Then he took all his savings, sold a land he had and borrowed money from relatives to assemble 4 million rupees ($ 45,000 / 36,000) to pay a smuggler to organize his trip, Gurpreet told us.
On August 28, 2024, he flew from India to Guyana to South America to start an arduous trip to the United States.
Gurpreet highlighted all the stops he made on a card on his phone. From Guyana, he traveled through Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, mainly by buses and cars, partly by boat, and briefly on a plane – given from one people to another, detained and released by the authorities along the way.
From Colombia, the smugglers have tried to make him a flight to Mexico, so that he can avoid crossing the dreaded Darién Gap. But Colombian immigration did not allow him to get on the flight, so he had to go a dangerous hike through the jungle.
A dense extent of the tropical forest between Colombia and Panama, Darién’s gap can only be crossed, risking accidents, diseases and attacks by criminal gangs. Last year, 50 people died in crossing.
“I was not afraid. I was sporty, so I thought I would be ok. But it was the most difficult section,” said Gurpreet. “We walked for five days through jungles and rivers. In many parts, wading through the river, water came to my chest.”
Each group was accompanied by a smuggler – or a “donker” like Gurpreet and other migrants refer them, a word apparently derived from the term “donkey route” used for illegal migration trips.
One of the migrants with Gurpreet took pictures of their trip through the jungle
At night, they threw tents into the jungle, ate a little food they wore and tried to rest.
“It was raining every day we were there. We were soaked towards our bones,” he said. They were guided on three mountains during their first two days. After that, he said they had to follow a marked route in blue plastic bags attached to the trees by smugglers.
“My feet had started to feel like a lead. My nails were cracked, and the palm of my hands was taken off and had thorns. However, we were lucky that we did not meet any thief.”
When they reached Panama, Gurpreet said that he and about 150 others had been detained by border officials in a cramped prison center. After 20 days, they were released, he said, and from there it took him more than a month to reach Mexico, passing by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala.
Gurpreet said they were waiting for almost a month in Mexico until there was an opportunity to cross the border in the United States near San Diego.
“We have not put a wall on the scale. There is a mountain near him that we have climbed. And there is a razor thread that the Donker has crossed,” he said.
Gurpreet entered the United States on January 15, five days before President Trump took office – believing that he had done just in time, before the borders become impenetrable and the rules are tightened.
Once in San Diego, he went to the American border patrol, then was detained by immigration and the application of customs (ICE).
During the Biden administration, illegal or undocumented migrants would appear before an immigration agent who would do a preliminary interview to determine if each person had a case of asylum. While a majority of Indians have migrated out of economic necessity, some have also left persecution due to their religious or social history, or their sexual orientation.
If they have erased the interview, they were released, pending a decision to grant the asylum of an immigration judge. The process often took years, but they were allowed to stay in the United States in the meantime.
This is what Gurpreet thought it would happen to him. He had planned to find work in a grocery store, then embarking on truchenage, a company he knows.
Instead, less than three weeks after entering the United States, he found himself led to this C-17 plane and returned to where he started.
In their small house in Sultanpur Lodhi, a city in the northern state of Punjab, Gurpreet is now trying to find work to reimburse the money he has and manage for his family.
Additional reports by Aakriti Thapar
