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All six US deportees from Kapurthala belong to Bholath sub division 

Feb 05, 2025 04:33 PM IST

Punjab’s NRI belt of Doaba accounts for 14 illegal migrants with six belonging to Kapurthala district, four from Jalandhar and two each from Hoshiarpur and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar.

Six of the 30 Punjabi migrants deported from the US on Wednesday belong to Bholath sub division of Kapurthala district in the NRI belt of Doaba.

Security personnel deployed at Amritsar airport on Wednesday before the military aircraft carrying the first batch of illegal Indian immigrants arrived. (Sameer Sehgal/HT)
Security personnel deployed at Amritsar airport on Wednesday before the military aircraft carrying the first batch of illegal Indian immigrants arrived. (Sameer Sehgal/HT)

The six deportees include a 10-year-old boy. The others are Lovepreet Kaur, 30, from Bholath town, Vikramjit Singh from Dograwala village, Gurpreet Singh from Tarf Behbal Bahadur village besides Aman Kumar, 27, and Harpreet Singh, 19, both from Bariar village.

Doaba accounts for 14 deportees with six belonging to Kapurthala district, four from Jalandhar and two each from Hoshiarpur and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar.

They were brought back by the US Air Force plane with 104 Indian migrants that landed in Amritsar on Wednesday afternoon. Thousands of undocumented migrants have been arrested since US President Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, including some accused of crimes.

Bholath Congress MLA Sukhpal Khaira admitted the action taken by the US authorities to expel undocumented migrants was according to law but was “a highly condemnable move”.

“It is unfortunate that youngsters have been sent back to India. My sympathies are with the victims who spent lakhs of rupees to reach the US in search of greener pastures and have had to return home to an uncertain future,” Khaira said.

“I always advocate legal ways to enter another country or settle in any other state instead of randomly setting out without documents,” he added.

Illegal migration queries down: Travel agent

A Jalandhar-based travel agent claimed that most of the deportees were asylum-seekers who would have moved to the US recently through “donkey routes”. “Meanwhile, queries for entry into the US through illegal ways have considerably reduced ever since the Trump administration announced its stringent immigration policy,” the agent said, requesting anonymity.

Earlier, he said, agents were charging between 25 lakh and 30 lakh per head to send people to the US through illegal ways but in the past two years, the rates had gone up to 40 lakh- 60 lakh as the task had become more challenging.

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