PM Modi will do 'what's right' on illegal Indian migrants in US, says Trump after speaking to Modi

In a readout of a phone call between both leaders, the White House said that Trump had a 'productive' phone call with Modi and sought a move towards a 'fair' bilateral trading relationship and deeper India-US cooperation.

Washington: India will do what is right on the issue of taking back its citizens who illegally migrated to the United States, President Donald Trump said after a phone call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday.

“He (Modi) will do what’s right. We are discussing,” Trump said when a journalist asked him if Modi had agreed to take back the illegal migrants from India to the US.

A strong anti-immigrant narrative was at the core of Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign for reelection to the office of the US president.

The issue of irregular migration from India to the US figured prominently in the Trump Administration’s first engagement with New Delhi.

A day after Trump returned to the White House as the 47th president of the US, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio had his first bilateral meeting with India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Washington D.C. on January 21.

Rubio “emphasized the Trump Administration’s desire to work with India to advance economic ties and address concerns related to irregular migration”. Jaishankar conveyed to Rubio that New Delhi was very firmly opposed to illegal mobility and illegal migration, and it had always been open to the legitimate return of illegal migrants confirmed as genuine citizens of India.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a recent report revealed that while nearly 1.4 million illegal immigrants in America had been served final removal orders, about 17940 of them were citizens of India. It also noted that 2647 illegal immigrants from India were already in the detention centres.

Jaishankar, however, pointed out that New Delhi could allow an illegal immigrant to be sent back from the US to India only after verifying her or his nationality and confirming her or him as a citizen of India.

The Pew Research Centre estimated that nearly 725,000 Indians had been illegally staying in the US in 2021 – the third such community of undocumented migrants after the Mexicans (4.1 million) and Salvadorans (800,000). As of 2021, the 10.5 million unauthorised immigrants in the United States represented about 3% of the country’s total population.

The number of illegal immigrants from India encountered by the American authorities on the US borders grew from 8027 between September 2018 and October 2019 to 96917 during the corresponding period in 2022-23.

A total of 519 Indians were deported from America between November 2023 and October 2024 through commercial and chartered flights, the Ministry of External Affairs informed the Lok Sabha last month quoting from the US government data.