Huge financial loss for some students.
AB Wire
Sixteen F-1 visa students from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, who had hoped to get an academic degree in the United States, saw their worst nightmare come true: they were deported from New York, back to India. However, their ordeal did not end there – they were further detained at the airport in Hyderabad for hours to resolve the issue of return fare.
The Hindustan Times reported that the 16 students were detained for 6 hours at the Hyderabad international airport, once they returned dejected from New York.
The students, who landed at the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport Saturday night, claimed they were stranded for around six hours at the airport due to some issue about the return ticket fares with the airline they traveled in.
The parents of these students approached Telangana deputy chief minister Mohammad Mahmood Ali, who had landed at the airport at that time from Srinagar, and sought his intervention in the matter, the Times report said.
“I asked the airline officials and also authorities to first allow the students to leave the airport. I told them they have already faced problems in the US. After I took up the matter, the students were allowed to leave the airport,” Mahmood Ali told the Press Trust of India.
He said that some parents complained to him about the authorities taking a long time in checking the documents of the students.
“Despite having all the necessary documents in order, we have been sent back… We are trying to know the exact reasons,” one of the students told a TV channel.
Another student said, “We have already spent Rs. 3-4 lakh and now after being sent back it is financial loss for us”.
On December 21 last year, Air India had stopped 19 students from boarding its flight to San Francisco at the international airport here on the grounds that the two universities to which they had been admitted were under “scrutiny”, the Times reported.
The two universities are the Silicon Valley University in San Jose, California and North Western Polytechnic College in Fremont, California. Both have denied reports of them being “blacklisted” by the US government.
On January 2, over 20 students, who had returned from the US to Hyderabad, had alleged that they were “ill-treated” and some of them were even handcuffed at the New York airport by the US immigration authorities.
1 Comment
One of my friend coming from ahmedabad, india to study at cleveland state university has been detained at Newark International Airport and is being sent back to india tonight.