After living in the United States for 30 years, he has been deported back to India
The Chronify
Harjit Kaur, a 73-year-old Sikh woman who had been living in the United States for more than three decades, has been forcibly deported to India. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials arrested her on September 8.
Harjit Kaur, a 73-year-old Sikh woman, moved to California in 1991 with her two young sons to escape political unrest in Punjab and built her life there through work and community ties.
Despite living in the U.S. for over three decades and having no criminal record, her asylum applications were repeatedly denied. According to her attorney, Deepak Ahluwalia, ICE officials treated her in an “unacceptable” manner. Kaur was arrested on September 8, transferred to a Georgia holding facility on September 19, and deported to India on September 22 without being allowed to return home or bid farewell to family and friends.
Her lawyer further stated that she was held for 60–70 hours without a bed, forced to sleep on the floor despite having undergone two knee replacement surgeries, denied proper meals, and only given ice for her medication.
ICE, in a prior statement, argued that Kaur had exhausted due process. An immigration judge had ordered her removal in 2005, and her appeals up to the Ninth Circuit Court were denied. Having no remaining legal remedies, ICE said it was enforcing the law and the judge’s order.
For over two decades, Kaur lived in Hercules, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked in a sari shop sewing clothes and regularly paid taxes. As an asylum seeker, she was legally permitted to live and work while her case was pending.
Speaking to the Times of India upon arriving in Delhi, Kaur said:
"After living (in America) for so long, suddenly being detained and deported facing that is worse than death."
Even after her appeals were denied, she continued to stay and work in the U.S. because she lacked the documents required to return to India. She had been reporting to immigration authorities every six months until she was arrested during a routine check-in in San Francisco.
Her sudden detention and deportation shocked and angered the Sikh community in California, where her supporters took to protests.
Kaur’s case unfolded amid the Trump administration’s hardline anti-immigrant policies. While Trump insisted he wanted to deport “the worst of the worst,” critics argue that law-abiding immigrants without criminal records who had complied with legal procedures were also being targeted.
