The US flagged “irregular migration” from India at the first meeting between new secretary of state Marco Rubio and external affairs minister S. Jaishankar in Washington on Tuesday, a day after Donald Trump assumed office as President.

The development is an indication of the attention the matter will receive under the Trump dispensation. Trump had after assuming office on Monday passed a series of orders directed against illegal immigration.

The bilateral engagement was Rubio’s first in his new post and came soon after the first Quad foreign ministers’ meeting under the second Trump administration. Rubio had been confirmed a day earlier by the Senate as secretary of state and was sworn in on Tuesday morning.

In its readout on the meeting with Jaishankar, the state department said: “Secretary Rubio also emphasised the Trump Administration’s desire to work with India to… address concerns related to irregular migration.”

Jaishankar’s own statement on X on the meeting made no mention of this but India has for years been working with the US to take back verified Indians who had entered America without documents or overstayed their visas.

In October last year, the US department of homeland security (DHS) sent back 100 Indians, who were staying in America illegally, on a chartered flight in an exercise conducted in cooperation with the Indian government.

Commenting on this deportation, external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal had then said: “We have a regular dialogue with the United States on migration and mobility and the idea behind that is to create more avenues for legal migration.

“As part of this, our regular consular dialogue and arrangement, we have facilitated movement of people who are staying in the United States illegally or are part of irregular movement and this has been going on for some time.

“We hope that with this cooperation and our engagement with the United States on mobility and migration, we will be able to deter illegal immigration.”

In an online briefing after this removal flight landed in India, Royce Bernstein Murray, assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the DHS, had said the US had repatriated 1,100 Indians in the American fiscal year 2024 that ended on September 30.

This, Murray said, was part of a “steady increase in removals from the United States of Indian nationals over the past few years, which corresponds with a general increase in encounters that we have seen with Indian nationals in the last few years as well”.

“Encounters” refers to US officials stopping people trying to enter the country illegally through its land borders with Canada and Mexico.

The Pew Research Centre had last July estimated that India accounted for the third-largest unauthorised immigrant population in the US after Mexico (4 million) and El Salvador (750,000) in 2022. The number of unauthorised Indians in the US, according to Pew, was around 725,000.

The US readout also said the two ministers had affirmed a shared commitment to strengthening the India-US partnership. They discussed a wide range of topics, including regional issues and opportunities to further deepen the US-India relationship, particularly on critical and emerging technologies, defence cooperation and energy, and on advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

In his post, Jaishankar said the duo reviewed the extensive bilateral partnership “of which @secrubio has been a strong advocate”.

Earlier, at the Quad meeting, the two had along with their Australian and Japanese counterparts, Penny Wong and Takeshi Iwaya, reaffirmed that the four countries shared a commitment to strengthening a free and open Indo-Pacific where the rule of law, democratic values, sovereignty, and territorial integrity are upheld and defended.

“Our four nations maintain our conviction that international law, economic opportunity, peace, stability, and security in all domains including the maritime domain underpin the development and prosperity of the peoples of the Indo-Pacific. We also strongly oppose any unilateral actions that seek to change the status quo by force or coercion,” a joint statement by the foreign ministers said.

“We are committed to strengthening regional maritime, economic, and technology security in the face of increasing threats, as well as promoting reliable and resilient supply chains.”

The joint statement also confirmed that the next leaders’ summit would be hosted by India, opening up the possibility of a Trump visit this year.

India was to have hosted the Quad Summit last year but because of then President Joe Biden’s preoccupation with the US presidential election cycle, it was held in Washington in 2024 with the agreement that the next meeting would be held in India.