Punjab woman, deported from US, paid ₹1 crore to agent, recalls 25-day ‘Dunki’ ordeal: ‘We were chained’
Lovepreet Kaur and her son were deported from the US after a perilous journey. She is one of the 104 Indian illegal immigrants deported by Trump administration.
Lovepreet Kaur, a 30-year-old from Bholath in Kapurthala district in Punjab, left for the United States with her 10-year-old son on January 2, carrying dreams of reuniting with her husband, who has been living there for the past few years. But those dreams were crushed when US border authorities caught them trying to cross into the country through Mexico.
The family had put everything on the line for this journey. According to them, they paid ₹1.05 crore to agents who promised a safe passage to the US through the treacherous ‘donkey or 'dunki' route’ across Latin America.
Back home, her in-laws, who own nearly six acres of farmland, had travelled to Amritsar to receive her and the child on Wednesday. But the shock of what had happened left them unwilling to speak much.
Lovepreet Kaur is one of the 104 Indian illegal immigrants deported by the Donald Trump administration.
It was Lovepreet’s husband who broke the news to the family, informing them of her detention and later confirming that she was being deported.
A village sarpanch shared that most of the money for the journey was arranged by her husband from the US, while the family had taken a loan against their farmland.
“The agent told our family they would take us directly to the US. But what we endured was far from what we expected,” The Indian Express quoted Lovepreet Kaur as saying.
How was Lovepreet Kaur detained?
Instead of a straightforward journey, she was made to take the dangerous ‘dunki’ route, hopping across countries in a desperate attempt to reach her destination.
Lovepreet Kaur and her son were flown to Medellin in Colombia and kept there for nearly two weeks before being moved to San Salvador in El Salvador in a flight. From there, they walked for over three hours to Guatemala, then travelled by taxis to the Mexican border. After staying in Mexico for two days, we finally crossed over to the US on January 27, she told The Indian Express.
“When we arrived in the US, they asked us to remove our SIM cards and even small ornaments like earrings and bangles. I had already lost my luggage in the previous country, so I had nothing to deposit with them. We were kept in a camp for five days, and on February 2, we were chained from the waist to our legs, with our hands cuffed. Only the children were spared,” she was quoted as saying.
What broke her even more was the silence during their 40-hour flight on the US military C-17 aircraft. “No one told us where we were being taken, and when we finally arrived in India, it was a shock. We were told at the Amritsar airport that we had reached India, but it felt like our dreams were shattered in an instant,” she added.
Opposition protests ‘mistreatment’
Parliament was disrupted on Thursday as opposition lawmakers protested the alleged mistreatment of 104 Indian immigrants deported by the United States.
A US military plane carrying Indian migrants arrived on Wednesday, the first such flight to the country as part of a crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump's administration.
Renuka Chowdhury, a Congress MP, said the deportees were “handcuffed, had their legs chained and even struggled to use the washroom". Her colleague, Gaurav Gogoi, called it “degrading".
Parliament adjourned as the opposition chanted slogans and demanded a discussion about flights.
The protests mirrored concerns after a contentious deportation flight to Brazil on January 25 prompted that country's government to seek an explanation for the “degrading treatment” of 88 passengers.
The Trump administration's use of military aircraft for deportations to countries including Guatemala and Ecuador is a departure from previous practice, which relied on ICE's use of chartered and commercial planes.
With inputs from Navrajdeep Singh in Jalandhar
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