“Those detained are mostly from Gujarat and Punjab,” said a police officer from Gujarat.
In January 2022, as many as 5,459 Indians were caught entering the US illegally. Of these, 708 were caught along the US-Canada border. The numbers rose 35.9% to 7,421 in January 2023, including 2,478 detentions made on the US-Canada border.
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Indians were detained in 2,663 attempted border crossings either from Canada in the north or Mexico in the south, the data says. Indians make up merely 2% of people detained for trying to enter the US illegally, but hardly a few were deported, according to Indian agencies and Gujarat police.
Many get refuge on humanitarian grounds. The US has been the world’s most popular destination for asylum-seekers since 2017, according to UN figures. Even those who lose in court can stay for years while their cases wind through a backlogged system.
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Others were less fortunate. Gujarat police have been cracking down on organised human traffickers operating in the state after a family of four from Dingucha village, 44km from Ahmedabad, froze to death on the Canada-US border after they were reportedly separated in a blizzard from a larger group of Indians that made it across to the US in -35 degrees Celsius in January last year.
The tragic news left the country shaken, but did not stop Indians from attempting to make it to the US illegally – some ending in tragedies that underscored the desperation.
A Gujarati man fell to his death when he and his wife scaled the “Trump Wall” at the US-Mexico border on December 14 along with their three-year-old son. American border agents rescued the woman and the child.
In March this year, 9,648 Indian asylum-seekers were caught by US border guards – 2,289 of them on the US-Canada border. The same month saw a family of four – Pravin Chaudhary (50), wife Daksha (45), and their daughter Vidhi (23) and son Mitkumar (20) – from Gujarat’s Mehsana drown when their boat capsized in the freezing waters of the St Lawrence river that flows along the border.