71-year-old Sikh woman deported from US to India after ICE detention

A 71-to-73-year-old Sikh woman who lived in the United States for more than three decades was deported to India after being detained by U.S. immigration authorities during a routine check-in in California, her lawyer and family said. Harjit Kaur was taken into custody on September 8 and flown to India later that month, prompting protests in her local community and renewed attention to U.S.-India deportation figures, officials and advocates said.

Kaur, who family members say arrived in the United States in the early 1990s and had an asylum case denied in 2012, routinely reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement every six months, her daughter-in-law said. Her attorney, Deepak Ahluwalia, said in a video and to reporters that she had exhausted appeals but raised questions about how authorities moved and treated her. Ahluwalia said Kaur was transferred from Bakersfield to Los Angeles and then put on a chartered flight to Georgia, where she was held in a temporary detention facility for outgoing detainees before being deported on an ICE-chartered plane that routed through Armenia and arrived in Delhi on September 23. Other accounts cite transfers through Arizona; reports vary...