A 73-year-old ‘granny’ deported by the US after three decades: asylum claims, overstaying alien and possible use of the ‘Khalistan card’

On 23rd September, 73-year-old ‘granny’ Harjit Kaur landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi and then moved to Punjab after being deported from the United States. Kaur stayed in the US for 33 years. While mainstream media in India and the US painted her story as a tragedy, it is essential to understand the circumstances under which she was handcuffed and sent back to India after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on 8th September.

Harjit Kaur went to the US in the early 1990s with her two sons. In the US, she made an asylum claim to get citizenship. For almost a decade, she fought with the system in the US to get her application accepted but all the available legal remedies were exhausted by 2005 when a US court ordered her deportation. In 2012, another set of appeals was rejected, and she was bound to be sent back after illegally living in the US for around two decades.

It took US authorities another 13 years to deport Harjit Kaur, who is now 73. Her story must not be seen as some tragedy, but it is a classic case to examine how asylum processes are manipulated, immigrant burdens tolerated, and political narratives exploited.

The deportation unfolds

Harjit Kaur tried her level best to be a model resident of the United States to claim citizenship. She regularly went to the ICE office every six months to ensure she could continue to stay in the country. However, on 8th September, during what was supposed to be a routine check-in with US ICE in San Francisco, she was arrested, handcuffed and chained. She was transferred across multiple detention centres and ultimately deported to Delhi before returning to her native Punjab.

According to her statements given to the media, during the intervening days between her arrest and deportation, she endured indignities. She was forced to sleep on concrete floors without a bed cover or shower. She was denied access to medicines, served non-veg meals despite her religious conviction, and even given a plate of ice when asked for water. While her family bought a ticket for her to travel to India and requested the authorities to let her fly commercial, she was deported before the family could meet her and say goodbye.

In a reply to the question on Harjit Kaur, the Ministry of External Affairs confirmed that since January 2025, over 2,400 Indians have been deported or repatriated from the US. MEA Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said, “In the last several months, since January 2025, so far, we’ve had 2,417 Indian nationals deported or repatriated from the United States. In the case of Harjeet Kaur, she also returned recently. We want to promote legal pathways of migration. At the same time, India stands against illegal migration. Whenever there is a person who does not possess a legal status in any country, and he or she is referred to us with documents if there are claims of being that he or she is an Indian national, we do the background check, we confirm the nationality, and then we are in a position to take them back. And this is what has been happening with deportations from the United States.”

VIDEO | On Deportations from USA, MEA Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal says, "In the last several months, since January 2025, so far, we've had 2,417 Indian nationals deported or repatriated from the United States. In the case of Harjeet Kaur, she also returned recently. We want to… pic.twitter.com/KG8QF8IjQG

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) September 26, 2025

The US authorities, for their part, do not appear to have disputed that Kaur’s removal was legally executed, as she had long since exhausted her appeals.

From unchecked asylum to indefinite limbo

Kaur arrived in the US in the early 1990s, alongside her two sons. She applied for asylum, implicitly invoking fears of persecution she claimed from India. Over the years, her pleas were dismissed repeatedly. In 2012, the final rejection came at the federal appeals court level. After that, she was under a deportation order but lacked a valid passport or travel documents. She remained in the US in a precarious, undocumented status.

Reports suggest that for over a decade, she religiously complied with ICE requirements that included reporting every six months, paying taxes, trying to obtain travel documents, never involving herself in criminal activities and more. Yet despite her cooperation, the machinery of the US immigration system allowed her stay to persist until the enforcement blitz under the Trump administration.

Her case illustrates how an asylum seeker, who lost her rights long ago, leveraged the ambiguity and inertia of the system to remain in the US for decades. The delay in executing her removal speaks louder than her final deportation.

The possibility of using the infamous ‘Khalistan card’ and asylum abuse

Her deportation raises a thorny question. To what extent have asylum frameworks been weaponised by those invoking the Khalistan narrative? In recent years, multiple cases have surfaced, specifically in Western countries, where Sikh migrants claiming persecution are denied refugee status. However, they manage to stay in the host country for years, and sometimes decades, undocumented before getting deported to India.

Consider the case of Pardeep Singh, whose asylum plea in Ontario was recently rejected by a court that explicitly called out the abuse of the “Khalistani card”. The court held that claims of persecution anchored solely in political or separatist narratives without independent corroboration cannot satisfy genuine refugee thresholds. Similarly, in Florida, authorities investigating a crash involving a Punjabi migrant named Harjinder Singh suggested that the individual may have entered using the so-called “Dunki” route and was attempting to leverage a Khalistan persecution narrative as a backdoor to settlement.

These cases, and many others, reflect a clear pattern. Many asylum claims, especially from people going to these countries from Punjab, rooted in generalisation and politically charged narratives, are used to bypass the legal immigration system and get access to citizenship.

The system is strained by such cases because it must parse genuine fear from opportunistic claims, a line that is inherently blurry when political, religious, or separatist identity is the fulcrum of one’s narrative.

In the case of Harjit Kaur, it has been clearly mentioned by US-based and Indian media houses that she claimed asylum in the US to get citizenship but failed. While the base of asylum, which is persecution from the parent country, has not been mentioned in any news report, it is safe to assume that she might have used the Khalistan card, claiming she supported the separatist narrative and ‘feared’ for her life if she came back to India.

Political reactions – empathy or oblivion?

The Indian political establishment has rushed to condemn Kaur’s deportation as inhumane, using emotive rhetoric about her being shackled, the indignities inflicted, and the lack of Indian governmental support abroad. Congress leaders castigated India’s foreign policy for alleged passivity, while regional voices in Punjab decried the humiliation of an elderly diaspora member.

Yet this outrage ignores the inconvenient truth. Kaur was undocumented, had no valid appeal left, and had lived in the US in violation of immigration orders for years. While the Indian government has traditionally extended a soft hand in such cases, the deeper betrayal lies with those who manipulate asylum frameworks by portraying India as unsafe, often invoking Khalistan or persecution narratives. In doing so, they malign their own country abroad, only to seek sympathy decades later when deportation finally arrives.

The US crackdown in context

Harjit Kaur is not an isolated case. Since Donald Trump assumed office for the second term as the President, the immigration enforcement push has seen thousands of long-residing Indians or Indian-origin persons deported or repatriated this year. There was de facto tolerance towards undocumented immigrants who kept a low profile for years, not anymore.

While being empathetic considering Harjit Kaur’s age is fine, the question remains, what exactly did she write in her asylum application? Did she claim she feared for her life because she supported the Khalistan movement? Another question arises, if she lacked proper travel documents, how did she enter the US in the first place? Why did they fail to secure the documents from the Indian government for over a decade?

Not to forget, hardcore terrorists like Hardeep Singh Nijjar had also sought asylum in the 1990s in Canada but failed for decades. It was only after his death that the Canadian government revealed they had granted him citizenship. The asylum mechanism is being misused in almost every country that is sympathetic towards the separatist narrative.

The moral and legal fault lines

Kaur’s ordeal raises moral, legal and political questions that go beyond her personal story. There is the moral dilemma of deporting elderly, non-criminal woman who has spent decades building her life around family in the US, only to be uprooted without notice. There is also the legal problem of how immigration systems allow such multi-decade limbos, where deportation orders remain pending and travel documents are indefinitely delayed.

Politically, the case underscores how asylum provisions, meant to protect the genuinely persecuted, are often manipulated by narratives of separatism or exaggerated claims of persecution abroad. At an institutional level, both the US and Indian governments tend to respond with symbolic outrage rather than addressing the deeper inconsistencies that allow such cases to fester. In that sense, Kaur’s journey exposes how legal loopholes and political posturing can sustain undocumented lives for decades, only to end in sudden deportation cloaked in emotion where no one dares to ask the real question, “What was in her asylum application?”.