NEW DELHI — A protest disrupted India’s Parliament on Thursday as opposition lawmakers condemned the alleged mistreatment of Indian immigrants deported by the United States.
A U.S. military plane carrying 104 deported Indian migrants arrived Wednesday in a northern Indian city, the first such flight to the country as part of a crackdown ordered by the Trump administration.
The lawmakers and media reports said the deportees’ arms and legs were shackled on the aircraft. Parliament’s proceedings were adjourned Thursday as the lawmakers chanted slogans and demanded a discussion about the deportation.
Renuka Chowdhury, a lawmaker in the Congress party, said the deportees were “handcuffed, had their legs chained and even struggled to use the washroom.”
Her colleague, Gaurav Gogoi, called it “degrading.”
Parliament Speaker Om Birla tried to calm the lawmakers, saying the transportation of the deportees was a matter of U.S. foreign policy and that the U.S. “also has its own rules and regulations.”
One deportee, Jaspal Singh, said the handcuffs and leg chains were taken off only at the Amritsar airport in India.
Singh, 36, said deportees initially thought they were being taken to another camp in the U.S and only found out about their deportation when they were on the plane. “The flight was into 8-9 hours and an officer informed [us] that we are being deported” to India, he said.
The U.S. government usually carries out deportations on commercial and chartered flights. The use of the U.S. military to return people to their home country started under the Trump administration.
Opposition lawmakers, including Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, also protested outside the Parliament as they demanded a response from the government. Some wore handcuffs and carried placards that read: “Humans, not prisoners.”
“Indians deserve Dignity and Humanity, NOT Handcuffs,” Gandhi wrote on the social media platform X.
He uploaded a video showing another deportee, Harvinder Singh, as saying they were handcuffed and their feet chained for 40 hours. “We were not allowed to move an inch from our seats. It was worse than hell,” he said.
Later Thursday, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told the Parliament’s upper house that U.S. regulations allow for the use of restraints since 2012, both on military and civilian flights. He said the U.S. authorities have informed them that women and children are not restrained.
“There has been no change, I repeat, no change, from past procedure for the flight undertaken by the U.S.” on Wednesday, he said.
Jaishankar said while the government was engaging the U.S. authorities to “ensure that the returning deportees are not mistreated,” India’s focus should be on the crackdown on the illegal migration.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Washington next week. President 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.
A spokesperson at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi said enforcing immigration laws was critical for the country’s national security and public safety.
“It is the policy of the United States to faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens,” Christopher Elms said.
New Delhi says it opposes illegal immigration, mainly because it is linked to several forms of organized crime, and it has not objected to the U.S. deporting its citizens.
Recent years have seen a jump in the number of Indians attempting to enter the U.S. along the U.S.-Canada border. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested more than 14,000 Indians on the Canadian border in the year ending Sept. 30, which amounted to 60% of all arrests along that border and more than 10 times the number two years ago.
Media reports indicate that Indians living in the U.S. without papers are mainly from Punjab and Gujarat states. Indians accounted for about 3% of all illegal border crossings in the U.S. in 2024.
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.
Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister, told Parliament that 15,668 Indian nationals have been deported back to India from the U.S. since 2009.
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 U.S.
Hussain and Ngashangva write for the Associated Press. Hussain reported from Srinagar, India.