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US border forces arrested the group and took them to a San Diego prison on January 22. He said, “We were handcuffed and kept like terrorists for four days. Chips, apples and juice were all we got for 12 days.”
Walking through forests and hills in Mexico, the group reached the zero-line border with a barbed-wire fence, he said.
Wishing to work in Canada as a taxi driver, Nagpur resident Harpreet Laliya- alias Roshan- gave away his family gold and two trucks so that he could reach the US-Mexico border. But the journey resulted in the 33 year old being handcuffed and put on a US military aircraft back to India as a deported illegal immigrant.
As he landed in Amritsar with 103 other illegal immigrants, the father of two took a flight back to his native town. He told the Times Of India, “I didn’t know what I was getting into when I contacted an immigration agent in my mother’s village of Gurdaspur. I told him that I wanted to migrate to Canada.”
The agent quoted an initial fee of Rs 18 lakh to prepare “a profile” for a tourist visa which he promised would be converted into a work permit later.
Roshan flew to Abu Dhabi on December 5 from where he was to take a flight to Montreal in Canada. At Abu Dhabi, Etihad Airways officials told him that he would be flown back to Delhi, as per instructions of the Indian embassy there. The next day, Roshan reached Delhi, he said.
“My agent advised me not to approach embassy, warning that I would forfeit the immigration fee if I did so,” he said.
After a week, he was handed a ticket to Cairo via Mumbai, from where he was flown to Madrid and asked to “lie low” for few days, he said. The next stop was Guatemala on December 26 and then Nicaragua from where immigration agents took them to Honduras.
He said, “In Nicaragua, we were told to insert dollars inside our passports and hand them over to cops at the checkpoints. Local agents had by then already handed us over to other middlemen, who kept changing at each transit point. Police would hand us over to the immigration mafia at some places. We were herded from one hideout to another.”
In Honduras, the group got “visas” to cross the US border, he said, adding, ” I had to pay the mafia $1,400 (around Rs 1.2 lakh). My Mexican agent also paid almost an equal amount to get my documents released.”
“We were shocked to see mafia and Mexican cops hobnobbing with each other,” he said. After this, Roshan and others kept moving from one city in Mexico to another till they reached Tabasco. He shared, “We were then taken to Mexico City in covered pick-up vans and dumped in a warehouse. Mexico police left us at the mercy of the local mafia.”
Walking through forests and hills in Mexico, the group reached the zero-line border with a barbed-wire fence, he said. “It was another 16-hour trek into US territory after crossing the border. We had a family from Gujarat with us,” he said.
US border forces arrested the group and took them to a San Diego prison on January 22. He said, “We were handcuffed and kept like terrorists for four days. Chips, apples and juice were all we got for 12 days.”
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