A record number of illegal immigrants crossed the southern border in the past year came from India, according to figures released by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
According to the report, around 42,000 Indians were intercepted at the southern border in the past year. And, over 1,600 have crossed from America’s northern border (via the Wall Street Journal):
Roughly 42,000 migrants from India have crossed the southern border illegally during the fiscal year starting last October through September, according to data compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That is more than double the number from the same period the prior year, when crossings by Indians hit a historic high. An additional 1,600 have crossed from the northern border illegally—four times the number who crossed in the last three years combined.
Since 2007, the total number of illegal border crossings by Indians in a fiscal year has exceeded 5,000 only four times. Indians nearly all turn themselves in to Border Patrol, rather than being arrested while evading capture, because they want to ask for asylum in the U.S.
One migrant, Arshdeep Singh, spoke to the WSJ about his journey to the U.S. He reportedly flew from New Dehli to Hungary “where he was kept in a small room for 10 days and given a few pieces of bread and some water.” He then flew to France and to Mexico City, where he was “locked in a room for another week.” He took another flight, a bus ride, and then was picked up by a driver in a pickup truck near the border. The whole journey took 40 days.
From there, he crossed into California and was taken to a processing center.
The path here turned out to be just as dangerous as it had been for me to stay in Punjab,” he said.
Reportedly, nearly all Indians turn themselves over to Border Patrol because they want to ask for asylum in the United States. And, there is an influx of human smugglers who pretend to be travel agents across villages in India.
“The U.S.’s lack of established relationships with those countries on immigration makes it slower and more expensive to deport those migrants,” WSJ noted.
“It really is pointing to this huge trend of mass migration worldwide,” Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, told WSJ. “We’re seeing that people from other countries are making their way to the U.S. border, when traditionally they haven’t.”