A United States military flight carrying 205 illegal Indian migrants departed for Punjab's Amritsar on Monday as the Donald Trump administration intensified its crackdown on undocumented immigrants, sources said. The C-17 aircraft departed for India from San Antonio.
Sources said each one was verified before being sent back. The aircraft lis likely to stop at Ramstein, Germany, for refuelling.
Trump had pledged to carry out the largest deportation in American history, and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has compiled an initial list of nearly 18,000 undocumented Indian nationals, among 1.5 million individuals marked for deportation. However, it was not immediately clear how many were aboard the departing flight.
Approximately 725,000 illegal immigrants from India live in the US, making it the third-largest population of unauthorised immigrants after Mexico and El Salvador, according to data from the Pew Research Centre.
These Indian illegal immigrants live a life of fear and uncertainty each day in the US.
Last month, New Delhi said that India has always been open to the legitimate return of undocumented Indians to their country when asked about deportation plans from the US. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had said that India was verifying who from the US can be deported to India, and the number of such individuals cannot yet be determined.
"With every country, and the US is no exception, we have always maintained that if any of our citizens are there illegally, and if we are sure that they are our citizens, we have always been open to their legitimate return to India," Jaishankar said.
President Trump said in January that Prime Minister Narendra Modi "will do what's right" when it came to taking back Indian immigrants who arrived in the US illegally. These remarks came after a phone call between the two leaders, who discussed a host of issues.
The Pentagon has also started providing flights to deport more than 5,000 immigrants held by US authorities in El Paso, Texas, and San Diego, California. So far, military aircraft have flown migrants to Guatemala, Peru and Honduras.
