Hyderabad students fly back after deportation

Chennai: Twenty students who were sent back from Los Angeles after failing to clear US immigration were stranded for six to seven hours at the Chennai airport. Most of the students who hail from Hyderabad had to wait for their parents to book their flight tickets back home and finally left at around 11:30 am.

According to D. Jagadheeswaran, national spokesperson for Lok Satta party, the students were left high and dry from 3:30 am to 11:30 am. “Their phones were switched off and I believe their parents booked the tickets for them,” he said.

A student who went to Los Angeles for further studies at the Northwestern Polytechnic University on December 29 and was sent back by immigration officials, said that he was asked irrelevant questions and no one checked his documentation. “They asked questions like what is my marital status and I answered I am single. Then they asked how many children I have. Since everyone was wearing shoes and I was wearing flip-flops, they asked me why I didn’t wear shoes,” he said. He also said that the Indian students were kept in custody and offered beef and pork.

Furthermore, his cousin said that during the immigration process in Chennai, the officials said they would inform the US embassy that he will be arriving. “He was not interrogated in India during the immigration process in India. The immigration officers in Los Angeles further said that the Indian institution he studied in was fake and Andhra Bank was fake,” she said. She also said that they wrote “revoked” on his visa. “The immigration officials said they know the documents were genuine. The Indian government also knows that what they are doing is not right, but there is no complaint from our government,” she said.