NAGPUR: Harpreet Laliya, alias Roshan, was sold on the prospect of earning Rs 4 lakh a month driving a taxi in Canada. So, he bartered his family gold, two trucks and a debt-free life in his native Nagpur for a Rs 50 lakh gamble on reaching the US-Mexico border – supposedly the gateway to what he imagined would be a future worth risking everything for.
Little did Roshan know that 62 days later, he would be a physical and mental wreck, haunted by memories of walking on an empty stomach for hours through hilly, forested terrain and seeing a fellow illegal immigrant shot dead by trafficking mafia after he had no money left to pay them.
The 33-year-old’s journey culminated in him being handcuffed and put on a US military aircraft back to India as a deported illegal immigrant.
A day after landing in Amritsar with 103 others, the father of two took a flight back to the city on Thursday. “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,” Roshan told TOI.
The agent quoted an initial fee of Rs 18 lakh to prepare “a profile” for a tourist visa that he promised would be converted into a work permit once he reached the country.
On Dec 5, Roshan flew to Abu Dhabi, from where he was to take a flight to Montreal in Canada. At Abu Dhabi, Etihad Airways officials told Roshan that he would be flown back to Delhi, per instructions of Indian embassy there. The following day, Roshan reached Delhi.
“My agent advised me not to approach embassy, warning that I would forfeit the immigration fee if I did so,” Roshan said. He was made to wait a week before being handed a ticket to Cairo via Mumbai.
From Egypt, Roshan was flown to Madrid and asked to “lie low” for few days. The next stop was Guatemala on Dec 26 and then to Nicaragua, from where immigration agents took them to Honduras. “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,” he added.
“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 supposedly cross the US border. ” 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,” Roshan said. He and other immigrants were ferried by car to Tapachula in Mexico, where they were made to cross a river by boat. “We were shocked to see mafia and Mexican cops hobnobbing with each other,” Roshan said.
Between Dec-end and first week of Jan, Roshan and others kept moving from one city in Mexico to another till they reached Tabasco. “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,” Roshan said.
The group walked for hours through forests & hills in Mexico to reach the zero-line border with a barbed-wire fence. “It was another 16-hour trek into US territory after crossing the border. We had a family from Gujarat with us,” Roshan said. US border forces arrested the group and took them to a San Diego prison on Jan 22. “We were handcuffed and kept like terrorists for four days. Chips, apples and juice were all we got for 12 days.”
