Punjab Police told The Quint On 26 February, it has registered at least 19 FIRs on the basis of complaints from the exile and arrested three fraud travel agents. The Haryana Police has allegedly registered for at least 35, while in Gujarat, no FIR report has been received yet.
For this, we ask for the reasons behind the reluctance of the exiles to take legal action against the agents who cheated them. He explained it in five bullet points:
“I think they need some time to come out of this tragedy – so much money wasted, as well as when they took the ‘Dunky’ (illegal) route to enter America, they had to face a lot of difficulties on the way; they also saw the dead body. At this time, a person may think that – it could not reach my destination.
“The exiles have suffered heavy financial losses. They think that if they file in the police case, they will have to spend more money on lawyers, etc., even they are already a burden of tremendous debt.”
“Third, they feel that it will be an additional trouble, that they will be called repeatedly to the police station.”
“When women domestic workers were deported from Oman, we encouraged them to register police cases. But they started threatening. They were being threatened by agents to withdraw the case or they would get serious consequences. Therefore, people are afraid of it.”
“Most people were aware of the fact that they were illegally immigrants. They were ready to leave and I will also tell you that the agents sometimes signed them a document and said that they are doing all these things of their own freedom. Therefore, the exempteds are afraid that if they take legal action, they may be able to catch themselves in this mess.
