The Indian government’s media agency the Press Information Bureau (PIB) on Wednesday evening “fact-checked” as “fake” on social media a photograph that claimed to show Indians deported by the US were in “chains and cuffs”. In the hours after that, a barrage of first-person accounts surfaced, confirming that was indeed how undocumented the 104 Indian immigrants were transported in the American military aircraft that landed in Amritsar earlier on Wednesday.
“A #Fake image is being shared on social media by many accounts with a claim that illegal Indian migrants have been handcuffed and their legs chained while being deported by US #PIBFactCheck,” the agency shared a picture, marked “fake”, on the X (formerly Twitter) handle of its fact-checking wing.
The PIB said that the image being shared in these posts did not pertain to Indians: “Instead it shows those deported to Guatemala.”
The image shared by the agency has a caption on the top that reads: “The claim that Indian migrants were deported with hands and legs cuffed with chains is fake.”
The first batch of the 104 passengers out of the 18,000 undocumented migrants from India so far identified by the Donald Trump administration reportedly had 33 passengers each from Haryana and Gujarat, 30 from Punjab, three each from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh and two from Chandigarh.
The undocumented migrants from Gujarat were flown to Ahmedabad on Thursday morning and sent home under police escort.
“For 40 hours, we were handcuffed, our feet tied with chains and were not allowed to move an inch from our seats. After repeated requests, we were allowed to drag ourselves to the washroom. The crew would open the door of the lavatory and shove us in,” Harwinder Singh, 40, told The Indian Express.
News agency PTI also quoted other deportees as saying the same thing.
The Congress party has strongly taken up the issue and Parliament on Thursday saw uproar over it.
The deportation of the first batch of Indians came barely 10 days before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to meet the US President Trump.
The treatment meted to the deportees sparked wide outrage in the social media.
“When Punjab demands international flights, permissions are granted only to Delhi airports to deny Punjab economic benefits,” said Jallandhar Congress MLA and former international hockey player Pargat Singh. “But when it comes to running a defaming narrative, a U.S. deportation flight lands in Punjab—even though most deportees are from Gujarat and Haryana.”
America’s ill-treatment of deportees came to the fore when the US sent back 88 immigrants to Brazil in January.
Edgar Da Silva Moura, a 31-year-old computer technician, was on the flight, after seven months in detention in the United States. This is what he said to news agency AFP: “On the plane they didn’t give us water, we were tied hands and feet, they wouldn’t even let us go to the bathroom. It was very hot, some people fainted.”
According to a report in Reuters, Brazil’s foreign ministry sought answers from Washington regarding the “degrading treatment” and cited “the use of handcuffs and chains, the poor condition of the aircraft, with a broken air conditioning system, among other problems.”
After Brazil, Colombian President Gustavo Petro turned back US military planes carrying deported immigrants and wrote a combative open letter to Trump. Petro later relented.
The Devyani Khobragade contrast
Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera had said Wednesday that “pictures of Indians getting handcuffed and humiliated” saddened him and recalled that America had to express regret over the treatment meted out to Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade in 2013 after the then UPA government retaliated.
Khera outlined the Khobragade incident on X.
Devyani Khobragade, who was then the deputy consul general of India in New York, was arrested on charges of visa fraud and perjury – based on statements by her domestic help – on 12 December, 2013.
She was arrested, subjected to a strip search, and released. It sparked a major diplomatic row between the US and India. The US requested India to waive her diplomatic immunity, New Delhi refused and flew her out of America.
Khera mentioned four steps that the then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government took; from former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stating the US action was ‘deplorable’, leaders Meira Kumar, Sushil Kumar Shinde and Rahul Gandhi refusing to meet the US Congressional delegation, foreign secretary Sujatha Singh’s strong protest to US ambassador Nancy Powell, withdrawing several perks given to the US embassy, to an Income Tax investigation against the American Embassy school.
According to the Congress, then US Secretary of State John Kerry had later expressed regret.
On Thursday, the Congress’s Lok Sabha MP from Chandigarh, Manish Tewari, questioned what purpose meetings with the US administration served if the government of India could not ensure dignified treatment of its citizens.
"This is absolutely inhuman to handcuff and shackle people, not allow them to even use the toilet for 40 hours while deporting them is medieval,” Tewari said.
"What is their crime? They went looking for a better life. They did it illegally but that does not make them criminals that they need to be bound hand and foot and treated worse than animals. What is the point of all those summits with @realDonaldTrump if @PMOIndia & @DrSJaishankar cannot ensure that our country men are not treated in the most humiliating and degrading manner."
The fact-check hurdle
Although the PIB is a wing of the Centre, courts have rejected the Narendra Modi government’s attempts to set up official fact-checking units.
In March last year, the Supreme Court had put a stay on the Centre’s bid to operationalise an official fact-check unit. The apex court said the Bombay high court would decide on its constitutionality.
In September 2024, Bombay high court Justice A.S. Chandurkar ruled that the Information Technology Amendment Rules, 2023 – which empowers the Union government to set up fact-checking units to identify fake news online – was against Article 14 and Article 19 of the Constitution.
