By News Desk
Kolkata: Six West Bengal natives, including three minors and two women, were picked up in June 2025 as suspected illegal migrants in Delhi, taken to Assam, and forcibly deported to Bangladesh. Four of them returned in July 2026, after spending a year in Bangladesh as actual immigrants.
“Isn’t it absurd that someone can just be picked up and thrown out of the country purely on a whim?” Sweety Bibi told Article 14. “I still can’t believe this really happened.”
Sweety Bibi, 33, and her sons, aged 17 and seven, along with Danish Sekh, returned from Bangladesh on July 8 this year. Danish’s wife and her eight-year-old son, who were deported with them, were allowed to return six months earlier, in December last year.
Expelled without being given a chance to prove citizenship
Danish and Sunali lived in a shanty with their son Sabir in Bangali Basti in Delhi’s Rohini. On June 18, 2025, police came searching for undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in the slum and picked up Danish along with several others.
Sweety Bibi and her two sons, Kurban and Imam, were picked up from a neighbouring shanty. Sunali and her son were detained when she went to the police station to ask about her husband.
They were soon produced before the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) in RK Puram. The office, on June 26, 2025, issued deportation orders for all six. They were allegedly taken to Assam and pushed into Bangladesh, while their families remained unaware of their deportation.
Left in a dark forest with the order: Run or get shot
None of them recall when exactly they were left at the edge of a forest after being taken out of a police vehicle. Even though Sunali grew up in forested areas in Birbhum, Bengal, she said the darkness was unlike anything she had seen before. Danish, Sunali, their son Sabir, along with Sweety, her two sons, Kurban and Imran, did not know where they were left, and yet the Border Security Force ordered them to run into the woods.
This story was originally published in siasat.com. Read the full story here.