NAPA: 15 go missing while entering US
Washington, March 9
At least 15 youths from Punjab have gone missing while trying to illegally enter the US from its southern border with Mexico and Bahamas.
The families paid Rs 19.5 lakh each to a Delhi-based agent for sending their wards to the US. Later, they together paid Rs 45 lakh to fraudsters just to hear a word from their loved ones
Six of these youths went missing while crossing the Bahamas Island-US border, while the other nine went missing as they were crossing the Mexico–US border, according to executive director of North American Punjabi Association (NAPA) Satnam Singh Chahal.
The families of these missing boys told NAPA that when the group, consisting of 56 persons mainly from Punjab, was only an hour’s distance from the US, the Mexican Army intercepted them. They detained six Punjabi youths, who were later released and reached the US, but 11 youths were taken away and they were still untraceable, he said in a statement.
He said after two days the boys called their families, saying that they had landed safely in Nicaragua and would be travelling from Guatemala to Mexico by road.
They even called them thrice en route and later said they had reached Mexico safely and after that there was no communication, he said.
Chahal alleged that the families paid Rs 19.5 lakh each to a Delhi-based agent for sending them to the US and later Rs 45 lakh in all to various “fraud agents” just to hear a word from their loved ones. The families never heard from their boys after they reached Mexico.
The agent took the money on the pretext of giving it back at the US detention centres in Texas, Chahal alleged. “Missing boys were to land in Mexico, but they landed in Nicaragua,” he said. Another group of six youths went missing from Bahamas Island, 80 km south-east of the coast of Florida and north of Cuba while crossing the US Border by boat to Florida. — PTI
