India, Feb. 5 -- The deportation flight of 205 Indian immigrants, to be brought to Amritsar by the end of Wednesday afternoon, is bringing back to their ancestral homeland those who once harbored hope for a better future but now are treated with stigma in society. Young deportees who had risked everything to come to the United States via illegal "donkey routes" return home with shattered dreams, financial woes, and the stigma of being a failure in the eyes of their own community.

A mother of one of the deportees, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Sunday Guardian that her child had worked tirelessly, and their family had spent a fortune to send him to the US. "Now this? My child is telling me, 'Mom, send me somewhere else. ...