India Questioning Deportation of Indian Students from U.S.
WASHINGTON — India has questioned the deportation of some students from India when they came to the U.S. with valid student visas to study at two Silicon Valley institutions which have denied being “blacklisted.”
“There is definitely a glitch within the U.S. system,” sources said pointing out that the U.S. consulate in Hyderabad issued F-1 student visas and they carried the requisite I-20 forms issued by the educational institutions certifying their admission.
The Indian Embassy here has taken up the matter with the State Department, the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security. Their response is still awaited.
Sources also said that a couple of Indian consular officers who had gone to the San Francisco airport were not allowed to meet the Indian students who had been denied entry to the U.S. and put back on flights to India.
On reports that some students had been denied entry because they had failed to satisfactorily answer immigration officers’ questions at the port of entry, sources said there could be one or two such cases, but wholesale deportation of students pointed to a problem in the U.S. system itself.
The sources also pointed out that the 14 Indian students from India who were deported last week and 19 others not allowed to board their Air India flights to San Francisco had all sought admission to California’s Silicon Valley University in San Jose and Northwestern Polytechnic in Fremont.
The two schools, meanwhile, asserted that they had not been “blacklisted” and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were just implementing stricter screening security measures, which are not specific to their students, but to all international students entering the U.S.
Advising all new and returning students to bring original documentation, SVU said “there were rumors reported by the media in India stating that SVU is being targeted by the US Customs and Border Protection.”
This, it said, was “due to the fact that there were some new SVU students being removed or deported back to India because they were not able to answer the questions adequately to the satisfaction of the inspectors at the port of entry.”