A third United States military flight carrying 112 deported Indian citizens landed at the Amritsar airport on Sunday night, The Indian Express reported.

Of these, 44 deportees are from Haryana, 33 from Gujarat, 31 from Punjab, two from Uttar Pradesh and one each from Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, The Hindu reported.

The deportations are part of a wider crackdown by US President Donald Trump’s administration.

The deportees include 19 women and 14 minors, the newspaper reported. The third batch of deportees landed in Amritsar within 24 hours of another US military aircraft bringing the second such batch.

It was not immediately clear if this group had been shackled by the United States military.

The second batch of 119 deportees reached Amritsar on Saturday night on a military aircraft. Sixty-seven deportees were from Punjab, 33 from Haryana, eight from Gujarat, three from Uttar Pradesh, two each from Rajasthan, Goa and Maharashtra, and one each from Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh.

From this batch, a person from Haryana and another from Punjab were arrested in connection with unrelated cases pending against them, The Indian Express reported.

On February 5, the first military flight with 104 deported Indian citizens arrived in Amritsar from the US. Of them, 33 each were from Gujarat and Haryana, 30 from Punjab, three from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh, and two from Chandigarh.

In the wake of the deportations, the Punjab Police has formed a Special Investigation Team to inquire into undocumented migration and human trafficking.

The deportations have also triggered a political row, with Opposition leaders asking why the Indian nationals were cuffed on their hands and legs on the flight.

On Friday, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann also alleged a “conspiracy to defame Punjab and Punjabis” ahead of the scheduled arrival in Amritsar of the second deportation flight.

“The Ministry of External Affairs should state the criteria based on which Amritsar was selected to land the aircraft,” Mann had said. “You select Amritsar to defame Punjab…Amritsar is being chosen deliberately to portray that only Punjabis are illegal migrants.”

He demanded that the Union government should get the plane’s route changed so that it could land in Delhi, Ghaziabad’s Hindon airbase or Ahmedabad.

Speaking in Parliament on February 6, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said they were shackled in keeping with past procedure.

On February 7, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said that the United States has identified 487 “presumed Indian citizens” who are facing deportation.

Commenting on the United States using military aircraft to deport Indians, Misri had said that the current scenario was “somewhat different” from past repatriations, as it was classified as a “national security operation” by Washington.

In January, Jaishankar said that India was open to the “legitimate return” of undocumented Indian migrants and was working with US authorities to verify the identities of such individuals.

A 2022 US Department of Homeland Security report estimated that 220,000 undocumented Indian migrants were living in the country. More than 1,100 Indians were deported in the 12 months leading up to October 2024.