Student handcuffed at Newark Airport: India yet to receive info on incident from US

New Delhi: Even as a video of United States law enforcement officers handcuffing and pinning down a citizen of India on the floor at the airport at Newark Liberty International Airport went viral on social media platforms, New Delhi has not yet received any information about the incident from Washington, D.C.

“We cannot and will not tolerate illegal entry, abuse of visas, or the violation of the US law,” the American Embassy in New Delhi posted on X, without directly referring to the man shown in the video. “The United States continues to welcome legitimate travellers to our country. However, there is no right to visit the United States.”

The Ministry of External Affairs took up the matter with the US Embassy in New Delhi. The Embassy of India in Washington, D.C., and the Consulate General of India in New York also got in touch with the authorities in the US. “We have so far not received any details about the incident or the circumstances under which he was restrained, the flight he had to board or boarded, and his final destination,” a source in New Delhi said.

The video, which was first posted on X, however, prompted the Congress to criticise the Union Government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party for failing to protect citizens of India in the US.

“We continue to follow up on the matter,” the source in New Delhi said, indicating that the MEA, as well as India’s diplomatic and consular missions in the US would keep trying to get the details of the incident.

“I witnessed a young Indian student being deported from Newark Airport last night— handcuffed, crying, treated like a criminal. He came chasing dreams, not causing harm. As an NRI, I felt helpless and heartbroken. This is a human tragedy,” Kunal Jain, an Indian American social entrepreneur, posted on X recently.

Jain posted several pictures and videos of the incident. He wrote that the young Indian, who was being pinned down, had been crying and telling others that the US law enforcement officers were trying to prove him to be mentally deranged, although he was not.

“This poor kid’s parents won’t know what’s happening to him”, wrote Jain.

“He was to be boarded last night on the same flight with me, but he never got boarded. Someone needs to find out what’s going on with him. I found him disoriented.” Jain posted on X, tagging the Embassy of India in the US and drawing the attention of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

The US had deported 332 illegal migrants to India aboard military aircraft on February 5, 15, and 16 – just a few weeks after Donald Trump’s return to the White House as the 47th American president.

Soon after the first US military aircraft had landed in Amritsar on February 5 with 104 Indian illegal migrants from America, the allegedly inhumane way the Trump Administration had sent them back had triggered uproar in India. The deportees had alleged that they had been made to travel aboard the military aircraft for over 40 hours with their hands manacled and legs shackled. They had been unrestrained only during toilet breaks, which required long waits in the queue as they had access to only one of the lavatories on the aircraft. New Delhi had strongly registered its “concerns with the US authorities on the treatment meted out to deportees on the flight that landed on February 5, particularly with respect to the use of shackles, especially on women”.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) late last year revealed that while nearly 1.4 million illegal immigrants in America had been served final removal orders, about 17940 of them had been citizens 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.