Learning From the Harshest Models, India’s Border Regime Is Turning Coercive

In June 2025, two families from West Bengal’s Birbhum district were pushed across the border into Bangladesh by the Border Security Force: Sunali Khatun, eight months pregnant, her husband Danish, their eight-year-old son and Sweety Bibi with her two young sons. All were Indian citizens. No hearing was held, no documentation was verified, no deportation order was issued.

A Calcutta High Court intervention, followed by a Bangladeshi court’s confirmation of their Indian identity, eventually began the process of Sunali Khatun’s repatriation months after the expulsion. This was not an aberration. It was the system working as designed.

Across very different political systems, border enforcement is beginning to converge around a familiar repertoire: pushbacks instead of hearings, detention without timelines, deportation without proof. The United States, Israel, Australia and the European Union have each refined institutional versions of this model, typically justified in the language of deterrence and security. India, long treated as an outlier in global migration debates, is increasingly entangled in the same logic not at the same scale but with recognisably similar assumptions about how borders should function.

What is diffusing is not a single institutional template but a governing principle: enforcement comes first and legality follows.

Learning from the harshest models

In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has progressively collapsed the distinction between civil immigration control and criminal policing. Administrative detention, workplace raids, family separation and removals with limited judicial scrutiny have become normalised features of enforcement. Israel’s border regime, particularly in its management of Palestinians and African asylum seekers, has long institutionalised indefinite administrative detention, population registries as instruments of exclusion and a security doctrine that treats mobility itself as a threat.

These systems differ in scale, legal structure and political context but share a defining feature: oversight is reactive rather than preventative, intervening if at all after harm has already occurred.

India has not imported these regimes wholesale. Training exchanges with Israel exist, IPS officers regularly visit to study “best practices,” and India has procured Israeli Heron and Searcher UAVs for border surveillance. But these transfers remain limited and India’s institutional capacity for mass deportation is far lower than that of the United States or the EU. Domestic political resistance also persists. Regional parties such as the Trinamool Congress have opposed the systematic demonisation of Bangladeshi migrants. What has travelled more effectively, however, is the underlying grammar of enforcement.

Legislative and administrative developments over the past decade reflect this shift. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens reconfigure citizenship around religious identity and documentary proof in ways that echo administrative categorisation systems used elsewhere. The expansion of Foreigners’ Tribunals in Assam from roughly 100 to 1,000 between 2019 and 2021 mirrors the scaling logic of expedited removal systems in the United States. From European border governance, India appears to have absorbed the language of “operational cooperation,” framing enforcement as technical coordination rather than rights-based adjudication, enabling pushbacks to occur below the threshold of sustained legal scrutiny.

Assam as laboratory

Nowhere are these dynamics more visible than in Assam, where citizenship verification, detention and deportation have, over two decades, fused into a system organised around suspicion. Foreigners’ Tribunals, quasi-judicial bodies operating under the Foreigners Act of 1946, apply relaxed evidentiary standards and reverse the burden of proof, requiring individuals to demonstrate their citizenship rather than requiring the state to prove alienage. The 2019 NRC left out over 1.9 million people, many of whom had lived in India their entire lives; all must now prove citizenship through these same tribunals.

The consequences are not abstract. In May 2025, Mamar Ali, a daily wage labourer from Bilasipara in Dhubri district, was detained by the Border Police while working at a brick kiln in Golaghat. Despite holding valid Indian citizenship documents, including 1951 NRC records, he was pushed across into Bangladesh without any legal procedure. He spent nearly five months without contact with his family before the Gauhati High Court intervened and secured his return.

His case is not isolated. It is, as the All-Assam Minority Students’ Union noted, indicative of a broader pattern in which the Border Police and Foreigners’ Tribunals have together become “factories producing foreigners out of genuine Indian citizens.”

Those declared “foreigners” may be detained indefinitely, even when deportation is not legally or practically feasible: when Bangladesh refuses to accept individuals without verified documentation, when detainees are stateless or of undetermined nationality or when Indian citizens are erroneously declared foreign but lack the documents required to reverse that determination. In one documented incident from 2025, thirteen persons were left stranded at the zero line at Lalmonirghat, unable to cross into Bangladesh, which refused to accept them and denied re-entry into India.

Assam’s Matia transit camp, India’s largest detention facility, holds several hundred detainees Bangladeshi nationals, Rohingya refugees and individuals of undetermined nationality some of whom have spent five to ten years in custody. The Supreme Court has repeatedly warned that detention “till eternity” violates constitutional guarantees yet the structure persists.

Pushbacks and covert expulsions

Along the Bangladesh border, pushbacks informal expulsions carried out without hearings, documentation or judicial orders have become routine. In May 2025, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma confirmed publicly that the state would continue pushing people back without involving Foreigners’ Tribunals and would do so even if their names appeared in the National Register of Citizens. That is not enforcement slipping outside the law. That is enforcement explicitly designed to bypass it.

Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims are regularly swept up in these operations, sometimes despite possessing Aadhaar or voter identification documents. Once expelled, return is difficult and legal remedies are minimal. Rohingya refugees illustrate the same logic. Deportations have proceeded despite acknowledged persecution risks and earlier judicial interpretations extending non-refoulement protections through Articles 14 and 21. The Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Mohammad Salimullah vs Union of India marked a significant doctrinal shift: while constitutional protections formally apply to all persons, the right not to be deported was effectively confined to citizens.

Family separation, often framed as a distinctly American phenomenon, has occurred in India for years with far less visibility. Children have been separated from parents during detention, left in state care while adults are expelled. The Birbhum case with which this piece opened is one of several such incidents documented in 2025 and 2026 alone.

Recent proposals reportedly under consideration by the Border Security Force to deploy crocodiles and venomous snakes in riverine border zones as a “biological barrier” suggest how far this deterrence logic can travel: from suspending legal safeguards to actively engineering the environment as an instrument of coercion.

Why scale still matters and why it is not enough

India is not among the world’s most aggressive deporting states. In the United States, annual removals have at their peak exceeded 4,00,000, supported by an immigration detention system with a daily capacity of roughly 34,000 and a yearly throughput exceeding 1,00,000 individuals. Across the European Union (EU), Frontex reported over 3,00,000 detections of irregular border crossings in 2022 alone, backed by a dense infrastructure of detention centres, coordinated returns and externalised border controls.

Australia, though operating at a smaller scale, conducts roughly 10,000 to 20,000 removals annually while maintaining mandatory detention and offshore processing. By contrast, India’s formal deportations typically number between 1,000 and 5,000 annually.

Yet scale is a misleading metric. What is changing in India is not volume but method. The normalisation of pushbacks, the persistence of long-term detention despite judicial unease, the deportation of individuals whose nationality remains unverified and the growing tolerance for procedural shortcuts point toward a reconfiguration of migration governance. The Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, tabled by Home Minister Amit Shah with the declaration that India is not a “dharamshala where anyone can come and stay for any purpose,” formalises this direction in statute.

The danger of becoming ‘not there, yet’

India’s border regime continues to be justified through exceptionalism: a porous frontier with Bangladesh, the legacies of 1971, security concerns along the Myanmar border. These conditions are invoked to explain why detention without timelines, deportation without documentation and pushbacks without hearings are necessary responses to extraordinary pressures. Yet this logic of exception has itself become routine.

This is where comparisons with more established coercive regimes matter most. The lesson being absorbed is not how to deport at scale but how to govern uncertainty by detaining without resolution, removing without definitive proof and normalising exceptional measures as routine administrative tools.

India is not yet an extreme case. The danger lies precisely in that distance. Incremental erosion rarely announces itself. Exceptional practices become ordinary, temporary facilities become permanent and judicial interventions grow narrower over time. Once that process is complete, the central question is no longer whether deportation is lawful or humane but whether the system retains any meaningful commitment to proof, process and restraint at all. Sunali Khatun, eight months pregnant, walked across a border she had never meant to cross. The system that expelled her was not malfunctioning. It was working exactly as it has been rebuilt to work.

Sahasranshu Dash is a research associate at the International Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Affairs (ICAEPA), an independent research organisation based in Sheffield, the United Kingdom.

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