F-1 visa student from India handcuffed, locked up, deported from US

A student from Hyderabad on an F-1 visa was deported from the US, but not before she was interrogated, handcuffed, and then confined for more than 9 hours with other students, according to a report in The Hindustan Times.

The unidentified woman, who has a degree in business administration, was quoted as saying she left for the US on December 30 and was to take a flight from Dallas to San Jose to get admission for an MBA program at the Silicon Valley University.

“They told me to go back to India as joining such a university would spoil my career,” she said. “‘Apply for a good university and come back’, I was told.”

She added of her ‘horror’: “In the name of procedure, the officials handcuffed me along with a few other Indian students, made us wear a uniform and put us in a cell with other offenders for over nine hours.”

Karunakar, a student from the state’s Guntur district, was quoted as saying US officials treated students like ‘thieves’.

“All our papers are proper, but still we were handcuffed,” Karunakar, who returned on Saturday, told TV channels at the Hyderabad airport.

“We do not maintain the record of those who are stopped here but those who were sent back would be close to 200,” an immigration official at the airport told the Times.

Almost all of these students were seeking admissions in the Northwestern Polytechnic and Silicon Valley universities in California and were sent back from ports of entry like San Francisco, New York and the US immigration checkpoint in Abu Dhabi.

About 200 Indian students have been deported in the last fortnight by US authorities to Hyderabad, the city that sends the maximum number of students from the country to American higher education institutes every year, the Times report noted.

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