A C-17 U.S. military jet landed in Punjab, India Wednesday with at least 100 deported Indian nationals on board.
First Post reported those deported included 25 women and 12 minors.
It was the first time ever a military craft has been used to deport undocumented immigrants back to India.
India has said it will cooperate with President Trump’s deportation crackdown.
“India does not want to focus on the issue of illegal migrants being deported. We know it is big business in India, sending migrants illegally. Instead, the government’s interest is in ensuring that legal migration channels to the U.S. for Indian nationals are not restricted by the Trump administration,” said Manoj Joshi, Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi to Voice of America.
Joshi said he wants to concentrate on H1-B visas which is used by skilled workers to migrate to the United States as well as visas for students.
Indians account for the vast majority of immigrants who come to the U.S. with an H1B visa.
Back in September, some 1,000 undocumented Indian nationals were returned to India on a commercial flight.
“That has been part of a steady increase in removals from the US of Indian nationals over the past few years, which corresponds with a general increase in encounters that we have seen with Indian nationals in the last few years as well,” Royce Bernstein Murray, assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security told a media briefing in October.
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