The American Dream: Daler Singh, 36, a resident of Salempur village in Punjab, went to the US via the dunki route | Photo: Suresh K. Pandey The American Dream: Daler Singh, 36, a resident of Salempur village in Punjab, went to the US via the dunki route | Photo: Suresh K. Pandey “Give me your tiredsnk, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
—The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
win44The deportation of illegal immigrants is the most tangible and troubling impact of a policy that is formulated on binaries—insiders vs outsiders, settlers vs migrants, locals vs aliens. US President Donald Trump’s shrill election pitch on uprooting all the parasites in America has directly resulted in Indians being herded into military airplanes in inhuman conditions and deposited back to where they came from. Trump believes they don’t belong in the US. The move hits close to India, where in 2020, several citizens were made to feel like outsiders post the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act. They were told they had to show papers to prove that they belonged. In this new world order, who is a citizen and who is not is blurred. Caught in the midst of these belonging-unbelonging, insider-outsider and citizen-non-citizen debates are just ordinary people trying to navigate through—sometimes unnecessary and unjust—mazes created by our world leaders.
In November 2024, when Daler Singh, 36, hopped onto a plastic boat along with 39 men and women, it was hurricane season. The Caribbean Sea was at its choppiest. The sea air was salty. It burned his lungs. The boat—filled to double its capacity—teetered from side to side, rocked by the ferocious sea. The group’s coyote stood at the stern instructing the 40 soaked individuals to keep shifting from left to right to keep the boat from capsizing. “That day, I closed my eyes and said my goodbyes; I didn’t think I would see my family ever again,” he says.
Having survived the sea, he thanked the stars under which he fell asleep that night on the Panama shore. He then traversed a dense jungle and the Mexican desert to cross into the US—the land of the free—in search of the much-advertised American dream. Within a day, he found himself caught by US Border Patrol, imprisoned along with hundred others and eventually on a flight back to Amritsar, Punjab, chained and hand-cuffed. “I was supposed to get there before Trump got elected,” he rues.
Hundreds of Indians have been sent back home, days after Donald Trump won the presidential election.
This is just the beginning; many more will be deported in the coming weeks. What does the life of a deported mean? What lies ahead for them back home?
This question has been bothering Singh since he walked off the US military aircraft onto the Amritsar tarmac. A resident of Salempur village in Punjab, he was among the first batch of 104 Indians deported by the US authorities in a much-publicised transfer. The first Texas-Amritsar flight carried 31 from Punjab, 33 from Haryana, 35 from Gujarat, among others.
US Deportation Row: Indians Among Deportees Sent To Panama, 'Help Us' Signs Spotted From Hotel WindowSingh, a father of two and a sole breadwinner, spent his life savings and mortgaged 1.5 acres of his family’s farmland to pay an agent in India an advance of Rs 25 lakh to take him to the US through the dunki route—an illegal immigration technique that involves crossing borders through a series of covert stops in multiple countries, often facilitated by agents who charge exorbitant fees. He claims the agent, Satnam Singh, a man from a nearby village whom he met through his brother-in-law, never told him the route was illegal. “I knew I was going to America but I didn’t know it was illegal. I thought I was going by flight,” he says. Between this false promise and the eventual deportation, Singh has been to hell and back, and the trip cost him Rs 60 lakh.
Dunki and Debt: Visa agents at Ranjeet Avenue in Amritsar, Punjab | Photo: Suresh K. Pandey Dunki and Debt: Visa agents at Ranjeet Avenue in Amritsar, Punjab | Photo: Suresh K. PandeySingh’s journey did not end on that dark and stormy night. “We reached the Panama shore by midnight. Still drenched, we fell asleep,” he elaborates. Whatever little food he had carried for the next leg of the journey—the thick and harsh terrain of the Darién Gap, a dangerous and dense rainforest bordering Colombia and Panama—was ruined.
“All we had was some packaged foods, some pre-packed teacakes and some energy drinks—enough to last a day,” he says. They had to walk from the Darién Gap to Costa Rica, their next stop. It was a three-day-long, 97-km walk through mountainous terrain. As he describes his journey, Singh buries his face in his palms. “Please don’t make me talk about it. When I do, I feel like I am right back there and I can’t breathe,” he says.
In the jungle, he saw skeletons of people who had attempted the journey but had been left to die because they either couldn’t keep up with the group or had become grievously injured along the way. There, the group ran into mercenaries who robbed them of their phones and whatever money they had.
Dunki and Debt: Ajaydeep Singh with his mother | Photo: Suresh K. Pandey Dunki and Debt: Ajaydeep Singh with his mother | Photo: Suresh K. PandeySingh points to the seams of his pants and says: “I’d sewn in about a thousand dollars into my seams but they knew, somehow. They forced me to give it all, and also my phone.” He believes the agents along the route and the mercenaries were in cahoots. “They know each other and they know people are coming here to go to the US-Mexico border so they lay in wait,” he adds.
After spending Rs 60 lakh, crossing through treacherous sea, jungle and mountain terrain, Singh had only just reached the Mexico-US border on January 15 when the patrol picked up him and his group. “I saw the US signboard and then we were surrounded by their police at the wall,” he recalls. Ironically, the journey back home was completed on a flight, but the humiliation he experienced on the flight will stay with him forever.
“It was the worst experience of my life but not worse than having to come home to face my family that was in massive debt because of me”.Asking why he chose to leave his wife and two children and his familial home to undertake such a dangerous journey to go to the country where he would not have any rights as an undocumented immigrant is a rhetorical question for Singh. “For work, what else? I have been working in India and sometimes in the UAE as a driver for decades now. What do I have to show for it?” He gestures around at a two-bedroom house behind him. “I have two children to think of—their schooling, my daughter’s marriage. No one in India has work for me; and if they do, the pay is minuscule—Rs 10,000 for a driver at most—nothing that will cover my family’s cost, let alone give them a decent life,” says Singh.
The desire to provide a decent life to their families often pushes people to undertake the illegal dunki route despite being aware of the extreme hardships and near-death situations awaiting them en route.
As per the US Customs and Border Protection (USBP) and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), over 92 lakh people attempted to illegally cross into the US from December 2022 to October 2024. The ICE arrested a total of 3,488 Indian nationals from 2021 to 2024.
Dunki and Debt: Mandeep Singh with his parents| Photo: Suresh K. Pandey Dunki and Debt: Mandeep Singh with his parents| Photo: Suresh K. PandeyMany recent deportees say unemployment and low wages in India often push them to take the extreme step.
Mandeep Singh, 29,fef777 casino tried his hand at every government exam he could qualify for with a commerce-based high-school degree. He holds up papers showing that he took the entrance exam for Punjab police and the Army. “I tried. I got 86 per cent in my 12th. I used to body build to be fit. All I ever wanted my whole life was to join the Army but there were no places available,” he says.
Mandeep was 26 when he took his first steps on the dunki route—he went through an agent to Spain, lived in a small town for two years, worked as kitchen staff and saved as much as he could. “I was happy. I was making decent money. I learned Spanish. But I had a younger brother at home who was about to get married and I knew what I was earning would not be enough to support my family,” he reasoned.
He knew an agent, Babal Singh, who lived in his village— Chola Sahib, a 45-minute drive away from Amritsar—and arranged for people to go to the US for work. The two spoke for several weeks arranging the money for his journey. “I told him so many times to take me legally, to take me by air, or to not take me at all. I was settled in Spain and did not want to leave it for an uncertain and illegal route,” says Singh.
The agent claims he had no idea Mandeep would be taken through the dunki route and denied being an agent at all. “I am now trying to help him get his money back because I am a good citizen and human being,” he says.
Singh vehemently disagrees when told of his alleged agent’s words. “He not only took me through the dunki route, he sent me through without paying the other agents, and as a result I was kept hostage in Mexicali (Mexican state capital of Baja California) for ten days during which time I was beaten mercilessly every day for hours by the mafia that he didn’t send the payment to,” he says. Singh and his family have registered a case of fraud against the agent with the DG-NRI affairs office.
“There were four men—one would hold me down, one would beat me with a belt, one would kick me with his legs and the last one would record the whole thing on his phone. They did this every day, telling me, ‘Your agent hasn’t paid and if he doesn’t, you will die’.”
Trump's Deportation Orders | The Global ImpactSingh remembers his captors tied him to a chair with ropes, binding his hands and feet, in a darkened room in Mexicali, just 25 km from his promised land. The Chola Sahib resident holds out his arms to show rope burns—scars that have not faded despite two months having passed.
The men, whom he says are part of the Mexicali mafia, took his phone, his money and all the possessions he had brought with him. His captors wouldn’t feed him for days and then give him food once a day—“some rice, some banana-like vegetable.” After 10 days, he convinced his captors to let him phone home.
“I told them it’s okay if my agent won’t pay, just let me call my family, I’ll get you the money,” he says. Ashamed but desperate, Singh called his father who runs an electrical store in Chola Sahib. The family is not well off, but scraped together another Rs 10 lakh to free their boy.
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The kidnapping and beatings weren’t even the worst part of his journey, insists Singh. “We were taken to the border in a container. There was no provision for air to come in, and at least 100-200 of us were crammed into that space—we were skin-to-skin with each other and sitting with our legs pulled up against our chests, no food, no water.” He recalls being in the container for a few days.
Just as they reached the US-Mexico border, they were abruptly let out of the container and told to walk the rest of the way—his coyote’s job was done, but his journey into the US and all that it has to offer in terms of jobs with decent liveable wages had just begun. And it ended just as suddenly when the border patrol picked up Mandeep’s group.
“I was there for 18 hours, and I spent Rs 45 lakh for that. It was the worst experience of my life but not worse than having to come home to face my family that was in massive debt because of me,” he says.
His family shares it has been a struggle having him back. “We watch him all the time—lest he harm himself, lest he run away again,” says Nihal Singh, Mandeep’s father. “He doesn’t look at all like himself; he’s half his size; I don’t want to imagine what he went through,” says his mother. Singh shows a photo of himself just before embarking on his journey to the US—he is unrecognisable.
The family took loans from relatives and from unofficial moneylenders, and now they are flummoxed as to how to pay the money back. Would he have left home had it not been for the hopelessness he felt while job searching? The answer is a resounding no. “Why would I leave my family but to make life better for them? If I had gotten a job—any job—I would not have left,” he insists.
The story of Ajaydeep Singh, 19, echoes Mandeep’s. They were in the same group in Mexicali city. The 12th-pass boy was in New Delhi on a job interview when he met an agent from Haryana who sold him the American dream. Singh, whose father is a retired army officer and whose maternal granduncle is a police officer, had hopes of joining the Punjab forces. He was unable to clear the entrance exams. His dejection was preyed upon by the agent who promised him a plane ride straight to America where he could apply for asylum status.
Indians Deported From US: Opposition Blasts Centre Over Deportees Protection Failure, Labels It 'Inhuman'“The agent told me if I go there and say I was unable to find any job in India, they will give me asylum,” says the naïve young man. The US only grants asylum to persons who can prove that they are unable or unwilling to return to their home country due to a fear of persecution.
Charanjeet Singh, Ajaydeep’s mother, is a nervous wreck. In between tears, she laments: “We took loans worth Rs 17 lakh from banks, borrowed on my husband’s pension, I sold my jewellery worth Rs two lakh, borrowed from our relatives and even mortgaged our home for Rs 20 lakh.” The family, whose sole income currently is Ajaydeep’s father’s Rs 10,000/month salary working as a security guard, is drowning in debt. “I can’t sleep—I am happy he is home safe and sound and not in prison—but we could lose our home,” she says.
This article is a part of Outlook's March 1, 2025 issue 'The Grid'snk, which explored the concept of binaries. It appeared in print as 'Undocumented Return'.