‘Not ever allowed to say goodbye': What Harjit Kaur's lawyer said on her deportation from US after 33 years
Immigrant rights advocates are calling Harjit Kaur’s deportation, which happened earlier this week, a cruel and unnecessary act of enforcement.
73-year-old Harjit Kaur from Punjab, who spent 33 years in the US, was deported back to India, with her lawyer alleging inhumane treatment by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials.
Immigrant rights advocates are calling Kaur’s deportation, which happened earlier this week, a cruel and unnecessary act of enforcement.
Harjit Kaur’s lawyer, Deepak Ahluwalia, said in an Instagram post that his client was suddenly taken from Bakersfield to Los Angeles on Sunday night and put on a chartered flight by ICE. The flight came to New Delhi on Tuesday, September 23, through Georgia.
According to Ahluwalia, the 73-year-old was treated harshly on her journey back to India. He said that she was kept in shackles for a prolonged period and confined in bare concrete cells. He also claimed that Kaur was not even “allowed to say goodbye to her family in the US.
“She was not even allowed to say goodbye to her family or collect her belongings,” Ahluwalia said in the Instagram post, in which he described the deportation as “inhumane”.
He said Kaur’s family had arranged her travel documents and requested that she be sent back on a commercial flight.
“We had just two demands: first, to send her back on a commercial flight, and second, to let her meet her family for a few hours. But they refused to listen,” the post added.
Harjit Kaur’s detention in the US
The detention of a 73-year-old Sikh woman in the US had sparked outrage across the community, both in the US and India. Harjit Kaur, who lived in the United States for the last 33 years, was detained by ICE officials after a routine check-in earlier this month.
As per a report by Berkeleyside, a nonprofit news portal, Kaur lived in the East Bay region in Northern California for more than 30 years. The Sikh woman was detained after ICE officials asked her to come to San Francisco to turn in additional paperwork regarding her stay in the country.
As per ABC7News, Kaur was an undocumented immigrant in the US. However, this was due to her asylum case being denied. Kaur came to the United States in 1992 from India as a single mother with two sons.
In 2012, the US denied her asylum, but since then, the woman has “faithfully reported” to ICE in San Francisco every six months for more than 13 years, her daughter-in-law Manji Kaur told the US-based news channel.
“ICE assured her she could remain in the United States under supervision with work permits until they could receive her travel documents," the report added.
Kaur had worked for over two decades at a local Indian clothing store, the report added.
