Assam starts shifting declared foreigners to India's biggest "detention centre"

Those who are being shifted to the new centre were either declared foreigners by the Foreigner Tribunals or were convicted by courts

Assam government has started shifting "declared foreigners," now lodged in detention camps inside jails, to a new and exclusive "detention centre" constructed in Goalpara district.

Official sources said at least 68 "declared foreigners" were shifted to the new "detention centre" on Friday and the remaining would be shifted gradually. This has been done as per an order of the Gauhati High Court in August and November last year.

The "detention centre" is now officially called a "transit camp" for foreigners.

The 68 "declared foreigners" include 45 men, 21 women and two children. An official in the state prisons department said the new "detention centre," situated at Matia in Goalpara, about 130km east of Guwahati has all the "basic amenities" including a primary school and a health centre within its campus. It also has a separate cell for the women prisoners. The centre, considered the biggest in the country, is spread over 2.5 hectares of land and has facilities to house 3,000 prisoners.

Those who are being shifted to the new centre were either declared foreigners by the Foreigner Tribunals, a quasi-judicial body or were convicted by courts.

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There were more than 1,000 "declared foreigners" lodged in "detention camps" inside six jails in Kokrajhar, Goalpara, Tezpur, Jorhat, Dibrugarh and Silchar. But most of them were released on "conditional bail" as per an order of the Gauhati High Court and the Supreme Court.

However, 177 of them could not be released yet as they could not submit the necessary documents to process their bail.

These persons were detained soon after they were declared foreigners by Foreigner Tribunals, a quasi-judicial body constituted under the Foreigners Act. Appeals of many of them challenging the tribunals' orders are pending in Gauhati High Court. They were declared foreigners after they failed to prove that they or their forefathers lived in India on or before March 24, 1971, the cut-off decided in the Assam Accord of 1985. The accord had promised to detect foreigners in Assam based on the cut-off date.

The construction work of the detention camp amid the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam in 2018 triggered fear among those left out of the exercise. More than 19.06 lakh applicants were left out of the "complete draft" of the NRC, released in 2019. Many feared that those left out of the NRC would be lodged in the "detention centre." But the government clarified that the "detention centre" is only for the "declared foreigners" already lodged inside jail campuses in Assam. The NRC exercise, however, has gone into the backburner as a petition filed by the BJP-led government in Assam seeking a complete re-verification of the applications has been pending in the Supreme Court.