Undocumented Return

The deportation of illegal immigrants is the most tangible and troubling impact of a policy that is formulated on binaries-insiders vs outsiders, settlers vs migrants, locals vs aliens.

- Avantika Mehta

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' -The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty

US President Donald Trump's shrill election pitch on uprooting all the parasites in America has directly resulted in Indians being herded into military airplanes in inhuman conditions and deposited back to where they came from. Trump believes they don't belong in the US. The move hits close to India, where in 2020, several citizens were made to feel like outsiders post the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act. They were told they had to show papers to prove that they belonged. In this new world order who is a citizen and who is not is blurred. Caught in the midst of these belonging-unbelonging, insider-outsider and citizen-non-citizen debates are just ordinary people trying to navigate through-sometimes unnecessary and unjust-mazes created by our world leaders.

IN November 2024, when Daler Singh, 36, hopped onto a plastic boat along with 39 men and women, it was hurricane season. The his lungs. The boat-filled to double its capacity-teetered from side to side, rocked by the ferocious sea. The group's coyote stood at the stern instructing the 40 soaked individuals to keep shifting from left to right to keep the boat from capsizing. "That day, I closed my eyes and said my goodbyes; I didn't think I would see my family ever again," he says.

Having survived the sea, he thanked the stars under which he fell asleep that night on the Panama shore. He then traversed a dense jungle and the Mexican desert to cross into the US-the land of the free-in search of the much-advertised American dream. Within a day, he found himself caught by US Border Patrol, imprisoned along with hundred others and eventually on a flight back to Amritsar, Punjab, chained and hand-cuffed. "I was supposed to get there before Trump got elected," he rues.