AHMEDABAD, India — A man gives his passport to a Hindu priest at a temple in this western Indian city. For a fee of about $2, the priest prays to the monkey god Hanuman for the man's visa application to the United States to be accepted. The prayer quickly ends, and another supplicant hands over his passport.
The Chamatkarik Shree Hanumanji Mandir is one of many "visa temples," as they're known across India, that boast of answering the prayers of Indians seeking to migrate abroad.
There are more than 5 million Indian Americans, one of the largest immigrant groups in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center.
But not all got their visa prayers answered. The U.S. has deported more than 600 Indian nationals who entered without legal status since President Trump took office in January, according to India's Foreign Ministry.
The migrants, along with new U.S. tariffs, have become thorny issues for India as it navigates a fast-moving second Trump administration.
For better opportunities
Pew estimates 725,000 Indian nationals are in the U.S. without legal status.
One woman in Ahmedabad, selling clay pots on the side of the road, says her daughter is among them. The woman gives only her first name, Maribehn, because she says she is worried about her daughter being identified and then deported.
"There were no jobs here," Maribehn says. So, her daughter and son-in-law sold their home and farmland, and borrowed money, to pay traffickers to sneak them and their two children into the U.S.
Maribehn says her daughter now works in a hair salon. She isn't sure where her daughter lives, but knows she's happy.
Deported in shackles
Barely two weeks after President Trump's inauguration in January, the U.S. began deporting more than 100 Indian nationals on military flights, according to Indian news outlets. They were shackled and chained, and footage of them was shared on X on April 4 by Michael W. Banks, chief of U.S. Border Patrol.
"If you cross illegally, you will be removed," he warned.
Deportees told local media when they landed that they had been shackled for the whole journey, including stopovers — for about 40 hours.
The deportations — of mostly men, but also women and children — shocked many in India.
"It was degrading, inhumane and a violation of human rights," Sushant Singh, consulting editor at The Caravan magazine, wrote of the way the deportations happened.
India and the U.S. are major defense partners. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi calls President Trump "my friend." During the first Trump administration, the two men held political-style rallies in each other's countries.
Modi did not comment publicly on the deportations — not while in India, nor when he visited Trump just days after the first military flight landed in February.
But an Indian government news website cited the foreign minister as saying officials had discussed the matter during Modi's U.S. visit. "India has strongly registered its concerns with the US authorities on the treatment meted out to deportees on the flight that landed on [Feb. 5] in Amritsar, particularly with respect to the use of shackles, especially on women," the website said.
The Indian government did not respond to NPR's requests for comment; nor did Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
Yet India's many pro-government outlets quickly rallied to Modi's defense, like the fiery broadcaster, Arnab Goswami, who said the deported Indian nationals deserved what they got.
"How do you want criminals to be treated?" he asked. Perhaps, he mocked, "these people must be brought back first class, with a glass of champagne in their hands."
Friends with tariffs
Analysts say India has bigger problems: like finalizing a trade deal they hope will eliminate the 26% tariffs Trump announced on most Indian goods in April. The administration then suspended the tariffs for 90 days.
"There are so many ways in which India is kind of coming alive to the reality that it is quite vulnerable to a Trump-led America," says Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the John Hopkins University SAIS Foreign Policy Institute.
India also appears to be trying to sidestep statements by the Trump administration encouraging India to resolve its long-standing grievances with its neighbor Pakistan. It comes after President Trump announced a ceasefire between the two countries on Saturday, after days of the most serious fighting in South Asia in decades. It was triggered after India blamed Pakistan for a militant attack that killed 26 people, mostly Hindu men, in Indian-held Kashmir.
But as Modi steers India through this Trump administration, political headaches caused by migration may keep erupting — because Indians may keep trying to reach America.
Many come from Gujarat, Prime Minister Modi's home state.
On a recent NPR visit to the sleepy village of Dingucha, elderly men sat under a tree in the square. Kids whacked a ball with sticks and rode bikes. The village's population is tiny for India: just 3,000 people, and many of them live in the U.S. Their largesse is evident: They've paid for nearly every bit of infrastructure here, from the Hindu temple to the municipal building. Inside the municipal building, administrator Jayesh Chaudhary says the donations are a signal to folks here, that "the people who've gone to America have made a lot of money, and so it also draws them to try to take that route as well."
The journey can be treacherous. Three years ago, a mother, father and their two kids froze to death as they crossed into the U.S. from Canada during a blizzard. Indian media recently reported that a related Dingucha family was deported on one of the Trump administration's military flights.
"Even if it's just a 1% chance of success, people will keep trying," Chaudhary says.
At least one woman wishes it wasn't so. In the nearby village of Vaghpur, dairy farmer Chetna Rabari says she last heard from her husband two years ago, when he was in the Dominican Republic, on a convoluted route to North America that cost the family $24,000. He sold some of their cows, used the family's savings and borrowed more from their neighbors.
Rabari says her husband wanted to transform the lives of their three children. "What will they become here?" she recalls him saying, "just cow herders like us."
Now Rabari is raising their kids alone, and repaying her husband's debts. She is also tending to her eight cows. It's all they have now, and it's just her, doing it all, until he comes back — something she says she still believes might happen. "I still wait for him to call," she says.
Sonal Kellogg contributed to this report from Gujarat state, India.
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