Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

[BBC]

A number of sporting governing bodies, including swimming, athletics and golf, have banned transgender women from competing in the female category at elite level if they have gone through male puberty.

According to White House officials who briefed reporters on Wednesday morning, this latest order empowers the Department of Education to investigate how schools implement Title IX, a US law that bans sex discrimination in federally funded education programmes.

An administration official said that the executive order will reverse the position of the Biden administration which in April last year said that LGBT students would be protected by federal law, although it did not give specific guidance on transgender athletes.

“If you let men take over women’s sports teams or invade your locker rooms, you will be investigated for violations of Title IX and risk your federal funding,” Trump explained.

Additionally, the White House plans to bring in sporting bodies – such as the National Collegiate Athletics Association, or NCAA – to come to the White House to meet female athletes and their parents to discuss concerns.

The official who discussed the order, said the US would do all it could to prevent transgender athletes from competing against females in International Olympic Committee competitions that take place on US soil.

President Trump specified that the order would include the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

He has said he will deny visas for transgender Olympic athletes trying to visit the US to compete at the LA Games.

Ahead of signing the executive order, Trump declared that “the war on women’s sports is over”, saying that during the LA Games, “my administration will not stand by and watch men beat and batter female athletes.”

He said he would direct the secretary of homeland security “to deny any and all visa applications made by men attempting to fraudulently enter the United States while identifying themselves as women athletes…”

IOC has been approached for comment.

White House officials described the policies as being broadly popular with Americans, and critical to ensuring “fairness” for women in sports, as well as safety.

In a statement, Human Rights Campaign president Kelley Robinson said that the order “exposes young people to harassment and discrimination, emboldening people to question the gender of kids who don’t fit a narrow view of how they’re supposed to dress or look”.

“For so many students, sports are about finding somewhere to belong,” Ms Robinson added. “Not partisan policies that make life harder for them.”

Less than 1% of the population over the age of 13 in the US are transgender, according to a study by the UCLA Williams Institute, and the number playing sports is smaller.

On Trump’s first day in office on 20 January, he signed a separate order calling for the federal government to officially define sex as either being male or female.

[BBC]