Trump’s slight to Modi in his deportation of illegal Indian migrants

In a stinging rebuke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US President Donald Trump dispatched a planeload of illegal Indian migrants back to India on 5 February without advance notice and just a week before the two are to meet at the White House on 13-14 February.

On 27 January, Modi had posted on X: “Delighted to speak with my dear friend President @realDonaldTrump @POTUS. Congratulated him on his historic second term.”

What compounded the slight was the fact that this first batch of 104 deported Indians was ferried back to Amritsar in India from San Antonio, Texas, by a C-17 Globemaster III, a military transport aircraft developed for the US Air Force (USAF), when such deportations are typically carried out on commercial charter flights by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The flight marked a defining moment in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, lending a military edge to this expansive purge, with further deportations expected. Only seven such military flights have hitherto transferred deportees to their respective countries in Trump’s second term, while dozens of others have been commercial charters.  

Junior external affairs minister Kirti Vardhan Singh had informed Parliament last December that the US had deported 519 Indian nationals between November 2023 and October 2024 through commercial charters.

Additionally, the largest number of the deportees — 33, alongside Haryana state — was from Gujarat, the homestate of Modi, which he does not tire of describing as “India’s model state”, which became so under his chief ministership from 2001 to 2014, since when he has been prime minister.

One cannot help but recall Modi’s post on X (then Twitter) on 31 August 2012: “I am looking forward to the day when Americans will be in queue for an Indian visa.”

Expectedly, the government stifled news coverage of the homecoming, and released no official statement on the subject. The Opposition berated the government for its silence on this affront to India and on the deportees, who included 19 women and 13 children, having been handcuffed on the flight, under the gaze of stengun-wielding military personnel.  

There has been a sense of unease in India since US President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration announced the day he assumed office, 20 January.

Patchy governance and constrictive policies have been driving record numbers of Indians to seek greener pastures overseas.

Indians are rated as among the unhappiest people in the world in the latest World Happiness Report, which assesses global life satisfaction on factors such as health, economy, and freedom. Co-produced by Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, the report ranks India 126 out of 143 countries, placing it even behind conflicted regions like Palestine and Ukraine.

A record 1.75 million Indians renounced their citizenship between 2011 and 2023, opting for nationalities of 135 countries, India’s ministry of external affairs informed Parliament last August. In November, it indicated that of the over 35 million Indians living abroad — the biggest diaspora worldwide — the largest Indian offshore presence, of 5.4 million, is in the US. Only neighbouring Mexico, with 10.6 million, has a larger number settled in the US.

Asked “did he (Modi) agree to take illegal immigrants”, Trump had told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way back from Florida on 27 January that the prime minister would do “what is right”. “We have a very good relationship with India,” Trump had remarked, but he had told House Republicans at a Florida retreat earlier that day that he would impose tariffs on countries that “harm” America, identifying China, India and Brazil as “high-tariff countries”.

ICE estimates 2,647 Indians detained for deportation in FY2024, and lists nearly 18,000 undocumented Indian nationals among 1.5 million individuals marked for deportation. Indian detainees were the fourth largest group, following Mexico (5,089), Honduras (2,957) and Guatemala (2,713).

On 22 January, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, who represented India at Trump’s inauguration ceremony, told Indian reporters in Washington:  “If it takes 400-odd days of waiting period to get a visa, I don’t think the relationship is well served by this; he (Secretary of State Marco Rubio) also noted that point.”

The prime minister understands well what it means to be unwelcome on foreign shores, as the Bush administration had in 2005 rejected his application for a diplomatic visa when he was Gujarat chief minister. Other Western nations had followed suit.

Modi recalled this episode as recently as 10 January, when he said his visa cancellation had been motivated by “falsehoods” and was an “insult to an elected government and the country”.  His role as chief minister in the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat had been cited for the visa denial, and while the toll was officially said to be over 850, unofficial estimates put it as high as 2,000, most of them Muslims. 

President Barack Obama rehabilitated Modi upon his accession as prime minister in 2014, and the latter has been personally beholden to the US ever since, purchasing nearly $15 billion worth of American arms over the past seven years, according to Foreign Military Sales notification data, and presenting President Joe Biden’s wife Jill the presidency’s priciest gift, a 7.5 carat diamond that the annual accounting published by the US State Department on 2 January estimated at $20,000.

Indeed, the Trump administration is set to pressure India to further scale up its military purchases from the US, from fighter jets and armoured combat vehicles to aero-engines, missiles and drones.

Indians heading lawfully or illegally to the US range from those aspiring to higher educational prospects or better career opportunities, improved quality of life, access to global mobility, and their children’s secure future, to those desirous of escaping their travails of living in India.

Indians traditionally corner the coveted H1B visas, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) notes that over 72 per cent of the 380,000 H1B visas issued in 2023 went to Indians, largely for jobs in STEM fields like data science, AI and cybersecurity, fetching them an average yearly salary of $118,000. Many of them, however, now face job offer withdrawals, visa delays and warnings of potential layoffs.

The situation has been aggravated by the targeting of the H1B visa by Trump’s loyal MAGA supporters, who have claimed it undermines American jobs and wages — even as Trump and Trump-anointed ‘special government employee’ Elon Musk themselves have back-pedalled on the issue recently.

India also became the largest source of international students in the US, a position previously held by China since 2009. The Open Doors 2024 Report estimates over 331,000 Indian students — compared to around 277,000 Chinese students — to have been enrolled at American universities for the 2023-24 academic year, accounting for 29.4 per cent of the overall 1.1 million international students in the US.

Many Indian students are now quitting part-time jobs in restaurants, retail stores and petrol pumps, where they earned vital money to keep them afloat, amid fears of deportation. Present F-1 visa rules permit only on-campus work up to 20 hours per week. Their families have often taken loans upwards of $50,000 to fund their studies in the US.

It is, however, the plight of the illegal émigrés from India that is most disquieting. The Department of Homeland Security last April estimated that 220,000 Indians, of the overall 11 million illegal immigrants, were living in the US clandestinely in 2022.

These fugitives take serious risks to reach the US. Many sell off ancestral land, farmland, and even homes to raise funds that help pay their agents $50,000 to $80,000 to plot their cumbersome getaway. If caught and deported, they have nothing to return to, and yet many are willing to risk another attempt.  

Jobs are scarce in India, with unemployment averaging 8.18 per cent from 2018 until 2024, and the UN Development Programme’s Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2024 estimates 234 million people living in poverty in India, almost a fourth of the world’s 1.1 billion poor. The Global Hunger Index positions India India at 105th place out of 127 countries, categorising it as “serious” alongside countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan.

On the other hand, numerous Indian-Americans have become vastly influential. They include Trump’s FBI chief pick Kash Patel, who incidentally also hails from Gujarat, Trump’s nominee as director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, his first-ever chief technology officer of the CIA Nand Mulchandani, former US vice-president Kamala Harris, current vice-president J.D. Vance’s wife Usha, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy who was made to quit the Elon Musk-driven newly-minted Department of Government Efficiency, stranded NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Trump, however, seems unmoved by their influence as Indian immigrants face an uncertain future in the US.

Sarosh Bana is regional editor, India/Asia-Pacific of Naval Forces. He concentrates on foreign affairs, policy, strategy, defence and security, cyber security, energy and environment.