The US on Tuesday morning reportedly sent back an unspecified number of illegal immigrants from India on a military aircraft, marking the first deportation flight despatched to the country by the new Donald Trump administration which has cracked down on undocumented immigrants.

Early in the morning, Reuters quoted a US official as stating that a military plane was deporting migrants to India, “the farthest destination of the Trump administration’s military transport flights for migrants”. There was no official confirmation of this from either India or the US. Responding to queries, the US embassy spokesperson in New Delhi said: “The United States is vigorously enforcing its border and removing illegal migrants. These actions send a clear message: illegal migration is not worth the risk.”

This is the first time a military plane is being used to deport Indian illegals. Earlier, the US used to send them back on chartered flights. Indications are that the C-17 Globemaster — a large military transport aircraft — flew out of Texas and is headed for Amritsar. Such deportations are done in consultation with the Indian government, which has time and again maintained that it will take back illegal immigrants once their bona fides are verified.

Once they arrive in India, the deportees will be questioned by law-enforcement agencies for background check and also to track down the agents who helped them enter the US illegally. Information gathered will be shared with the CBI, which is already probing human-trafficking cases.

Barring one instance, all earlier removal flights were kept under wraps by both sides. In late October last year, just ahead of the US presidential elections, the American Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it had sent a removal flight to India. Despite making the announcement, the DHS did not disclose the number of illegal migrants on board or details on where they would disembark. Later, DHS officials revealed that 100 Indians had been deported on that chartered flight.

In an online briefing after the removal flight landed in India, Royce Bernstein Murray, assistant secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at the DHS, said the US had repatriated 1,100 Indians in the American fiscal year 2024 that ended on September 30.

This, according to Murray, was part of a “steady increase in removals from the United States 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”. Encounters refer to US officials stopping people trying to enter the country illegally through its land borders with Canada and Mexico.

The Pew Research Centre in July 2024 estimated that India accounted for the third largest unauthorised immigrant population in the US after Mexico (4 million) and El Salvador (7.5 lakh) in 2022. The number of unauthorised Indians in the US, according to Pew, was around 7,25,000.

Last month, a day after Trump’s inauguration, his secretary of state Marco Rubio had raised the issue of “illegal migration” from India in his first meeting with external affairs minister S. Jaishankar.

Briefing journalists in Washington later, Jaishankar said: “As a government, we obviously are very much supportive of legal mobility because we do believe in a global workplace. We want Indian talent and Indian skills to have the maximum opportunity at a global level. At the same time, we are also very firmly opposed to illegal mobility and illegal migration because when something illegal happens, many other illegal activities get joined onto it, and this is not desirable, it’s certainly not reputationally good.

“So with every country, and the US is no exception, we have always taken the view that if there are any of our citizens who are not here legally, if we are sure that they are our citizens, we have always been open to their legitimate return to India.”