AHMEDABAD/NEW DELHI: A 40-year-old man from Gujarat’s Mehsana district, who had sneaked into the United States through illegal ‘donkey’ routes, was arrested at Delhi’s IGI airport on September 8 after arriving with a forged passport in a bid to deport himself.
According to central agency officials, the resident of Jagudan village had first flown legally to Vietnam in October 2018 before embarking on a 15-month-long, perilous journey through multiple countries to reach Atlanta, where he lived undocumented. He stayed with another Mehsana native and worked at a motel and a gas station to survive.
Fearing deportation crackdowns after Donald Trump’s return as US president, the man allegedly procured a forged passport in the name of a Himachal Pradesh resident to facilitate his return to India. Issued in Atlanta in 2020, the document “lacked basic security features” and was immediately flagged as fake by immigration officers in Delhi, a police officer said.
He was arrested and booked under multiple provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including cheating, impersonation, and forgery, as well as Section 12 of the Passport Act. Authorities seized the forged passport, travel papers, deportee records, and CCTV footage as evidence.
Police sources said cases of “self-deportation” among undocumented Indians in the US have been rising, often involving fake travel documents, creating complications for both Indian and US authorities.
