No Canada-US agreement to deport 1.2 million 'illegal Indian immigrants'

"Just in, United States and Canada have approved the plan to deport 1.2 Million illegal Indian immigrants," says the text of an X post shared on Facebook on January 24, 2025.

Similar posts spread elsewhere on X, Facebook and Instagram with the claim that the North American countries had come to a joint deal to remove undocumented Indians back to their country of origin.

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Screenshot of an X post taken February 5, 2025

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Screenshot of a Facebook post taken February 5, 2025

Trump made large-scale deportations a campaign promise while he pursued the presidency and numerous people have been removed since he took office, including a flight of 104 Indian migrants which landed in Amritsar on February 5. At the same time, false claims about deportations and Trump's immigrant policy have spread and were fact-checked by AFP.

The American president also pushed Canada to crack down on irregular crossings over its shared border with the United States, to the point of threatening up to 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods if his demands were not met.

On December 17, 2024, Canada proposed a new border security plan (archived here), hoping to allay the possibility of a trade war. While this framework does address crackdowns on irregular crossings and augments the number of removals of unauthorized immigrants, it does not specifically address the deportation of Indian immigrants.

"This claim is unfounded," said Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) spokeswoman Jacqueline Roby in a January 28, 2025 email.

Immigration measures

On February 1, Trump announced that tariffs on Canadian goods were going into effect, but an apparent entente was reached on February 3 when both countries announced a 30-day pause to levies, citing many aspects of the plan Canada introduced in December 2024 (archived here).

When queried on February 4, 2025 as to whether the development in negotiations led to any changes in Canada's border security proposals, CBSA said the plan remains the same.

One of the measures proposed in the framework calls for an increase in the removal of "inadmissible people" from Canada to 20,000 per fiscal year. CBSA said it had removed 16,470 total foreign nationals -- not just from India -- in 2024 for violating the country's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (archived here). AFP asked CBSA how many of the people removed were from India, but a response was not forthcoming, and the data does not appear to be listed on government websites.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported more than 545,000 removals between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, of which 2,467 were Indians (archived here).

Prior to the Amritsar flight, the Indian government said it had identified 18,000 illegal immigrants from its country living in the United States and that it would be working with US authorities to repatriate them. On February 6, 2025 New Delhi promised strong crackdowns on illegal migration. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said all countries had an "obligation" to take back their nationals living illegally abroad. 

The Pew Research Center estimated there were more than 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the US in 2022 (the most recent year for which data is available), 750,000 of which were from India (archived here). Canada has not put an exact number to the amount of undocumented people in the country but in 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada estimated the total -- without breaking down country of origin -- could be as high as 500,000 (archived here).

Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation on migration here.