US military deportation flights land at Amritsar

Who: Indian nationals deported by the United States, many of them from Punjab, including Sikhs; the SGPC, led by president Harjinder Singh Dhami; Punjab ministers; Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann; and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.

What: On 5 February 2025 a US Air Force C-17 landed at Amritsar with 104 deported Indians, the first of three US military flights that month. The Tribune put 30 of them from Punjab, 33 from Haryana and 33 from Gujarat. Deportees said they were handcuffed and leg-chained for a journey of about 40 hours. Jaishankar told Parliament on 6 February that restraints followed a US procedure in place since 2012 and that, as the US told India, women and children were not restrained.

A second plane landed late on Saturday 15 February with 119 deportees, 67 of them from Punjab by Scroll's count, and a third on 16 February with 112, of whom 31 were from Punjab. About 24 Sikhs were on the second flight, by unconfirmed reports. They told Punjab ministers that they were made to remove their turbans and then handcuffed, with the cuffs taken off shortly before landing and no cloth given to cover their heads. SGPC staff at the airport handed them patkas and parnas, and the SGPC arranged langar and overnight rooms in the sarais of the Golden Temple complex. Dhami called the US authorities insensitive to Sikh religious sentiment, and SGPC secretary Partap Singh said the deportees were treated like criminals or extremists. On 21 February the Ministry of External Affairs said it had raised the matter with the US and asked that deportees be treated humanely with their religious sensitivities respected.

Bhagwant Mann alleged a plot to defame Punjab and asked that the planes land in Delhi, Hindon or Ahmedabad instead. Punjab Police set up a Special Investigation Team on undocumented migration and human trafficking.

Where: Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport, Amritsar, and the Golden Temple complex.

Why it mattered: The flights put the cost of Punjab's irregular emigration in public view: families told The Tribune they had paid between Rs 35 lakh and Rs 60 lakh to send the deportees to the US. A Lok Sabha reply in August 2025 showed that of 1,703 Indians deported from the US between 20 January and 22 July 2025, 620 were from Punjab, the most of any state, ahead of Haryana with 604. The turban reports made it a question of Sikh dignity as well as migration policy.