ICE arrests Indian origin woman in US for 30 years during green card interview

A 60-year-old woman of Indian origin who has been living in the United States since 1994 was detained earlier this month by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a biometric appointment linked to her pending green card application, according to her family, NDTV reported.

Babblejit “Bubbly” Kaur, who previously co-owned a restaurant called Natraj Cuisine of India and Nepal in Long Beach’s Belmont Shore area in California, was taken into custody on December 1 at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services facility, The Indian Express reported. The newspaper said she does not have any criminal record.

Her detention has taken place against the backdrop of stricter immigration rules and an intensified crackdown on undocumented migrants under the Donald Trump administration since January 2025.

Kaur had already received approval for a green card petition filed by her daughter and son-in-law, both of whom are US citizens, her other daughter, Joti Kaur, was quoted as saying by the Long Beach Watchdog. A green card, formally known as a Permanent Resident Card, permits an individual to live and work permanently in the United States, Scroll.in reported.

Joti Kaur said the December 1 appointment was expected to be the final procedural step in her mother’s adjustment of status to permanent residency. She told local media that her mother was at the front desk of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office when several federal agents entered the building, NDTV reported.

According to Joti Kaur, her mother was then called into a room, where federal agents informed her that she was being arrested. She was briefly allowed to contact her lawyer before being taken into custody, The Indian Express reported, citing local media.

The family was not informed of her whereabouts for several hours, NDTV said, and later learned that she had been transferred overnight to Adelanto, a former federal prison in California’s High Desert that now functions as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centre. As of Monday, she remained detained at the facility.

The Indian Express reported that neither Immigration and Customs Enforcement nor the Department of Homeland Security has publicly stated the reason for her detention.

Babblejit Kaur’s family, which originally migrated from India, settled in California in the mid-1990s. She and her husband have three children. While her daughter Joti Kaur has legal status in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, her elder son and daughter are American citizens.

A similar incident was reported in September, when 73-year-old Bibi Harjit Kaur was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a routine immigration check-in in California. She was later transferred from a detention centre in the state to a facility nearly 4,000 km away in Georgia, without her lawyer or family being informed. Two weeks later, she was deported to India and is now back in Punjab.

Meanwhile, the Indian government told Parliament on December 4 that the United States has deported 18,822 Indian nationals since 2009. Of these, 3,258 deportations have taken place since January 2025, the Ministry of External Affairs said. The data showed that more than 1,360 Indians were deported in 2024, while 617 were deported in 2023.

The ministry also said that among those deported in 2025 up to November 28, around 2,000 individuals were sent back on commercial flights, while others were deported on chartered flights operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.