Amritsar, India. A US military plane carrying 104 deported Indian migrants arrived in a northern Indian city on Wednesday, the first such flight to the country as part of a crackdown ordered by the Donald Trump administration, airport officials said.

The Indians who returned home had illegally entered the United States over the years and came from various Indian states.

The move came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington, which is expected next week. US President Donald Trump and Modi discussed immigration in a phone call last week and Trump stressed the importance of India buying more American-made security equipment and fair bilateral trade.

India has cooperated with the US and said it is ready to accept the deported Indians after verification.

New Delhi says it is against illegal immigration, mainly because it is linked to several forms of organized crime, and it has not objected to the US deporting its citizens.

"For Indians, not just in the United States but anywhere in the world, if they are Indian nationals, and they are overstaying or they are in a particular country without proper documentation, we will take them back, provided documents are shared with us so that we can verify their nationality that they are indeed Indians,” India’s External Affairs Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said last month.

"If that happens to be the case, then we will take things forward. We will facilitate the return to India,” Jaiswal said.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said earlier this week the deportation flights were an effective way to stem the flow of illegal migration, which he said is destructive and destabilizing.

The State Department said such deportations send a message of deterrence to other people considering migrating illegally.

India’s junior External Affairs Minister Kirti Vardhan Singh told India’s Parliament that 519 Indian nationals were deported to India between November 2023 and October 2024, citing US government data.

The U.S. government carries out deportations through commercial and chartered flights, he added.

The use of the US military to return people to their home country is a relatively new phenomenon that started under the Trump administration.

A Pew Research Center report said that as of 2022, India ranked third, after Mexico and El Salvador, on the list of countries with the largest number of unauthorized immigrants — 725,000 — living in the US.

In recent years, there has also been a jump in the number of Indians attempting to enter the country along the US-Canada border. The US Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending Sept. 30, which amounted to 60 percent of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.

Media reports indicate that the Indians living in the US without documents are mainly from Punjab and Gujarat states, and that Indians comprised about 3 percent of all illegal border crossings in the US in 2024.

The Indian Express newspaper said there were 20,407 undocumented Indians as of November last year who are either facing final removal orders or are currently in detention centers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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