Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
Claim
An estimated 275,000 people of Nepali origin living in the US will be deported as part of Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportation of illegal migrants.
Fact
No, Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy is aimed at sending back only the illegal immigrants.
A video claiming that an estimated 275,000 people of Nepali origin, who have been living in the US after winning a Diversity Visa, would be sent back to Nepal is going viral on TikTok.
After his election victory, US President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that he plans to use the military to carry out a mass deportation of undocumented migrants.
According to the US Census Bureau, Nepali population was the fastest growing Asian group, growing from almost 52,000 people in 2010 to almost 206,000 people in 2020.
Against this backdrop, TikTok user @maushoof posted a video showing a photo of US President-elect Donald Trump. Text superimposed on the video reads, “All 275,000 Nepali people who have been living in the US by winning the US green card after 2016 would be sent back. Trump committed to his policy of mass deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants.” Audio accompanying the video presented in a news bulletin style says, “Trump committed to deport 11 million illegal immigrants from the US. The deportation will cost an estimated US $125 billion.”
The video posted on November 10 has garnered 25.9k likes, 3902 users have liked it and 1137 people have commented until the time of publishing this article.
Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the veracity of the claim, Newschecker first listened to the voice-over accompanying the video and noticed the signature news theme of Nepal’s popular Kantipur Television.
Taking a clue from it, we ran a Google search by using relevant Nepali keywords for Trump’s commitment to deport illegal immigrants and found a video, dated Nov 8, 2024, published on the website of Kantipur Television. The audio clip of the news headlines from 1.05-minute onwards exactly matched the audio of the viral video.
We then looked up reports regarding President-elect Trump’s vow to deport illegal immigrants and found several news articles. On checking an article, dated November 19, published on BBC, we found that Donald Trump has confirmed that he plans to use the US military to carry out a mass deportation of undocumented migrants.
However, we didn’t find any news or reports regarding the Trump administration’s plan to strip the green cards of the people who are in the US via the diversity visa programme.
What is the Diversity Visa (DV) programme?
According to the US state department, Diversity Visa is an annual program for immigration to the United States from countries with low rates of immigration. Up to 55,000 immigrants can enter the United States each year through the DV immigration programme.
Earlier in 2020 when Donald Trump was serving in his previous stint as the US President, he had promised to eliminate the diversity visa lottery. But the state department announced to go ahead with the lottery for 50,000 visas available for the fiscal year 2020.
Thus our findings clearly show that Trump’s election promise to deport illegal immigrants doesn’t apply to the people who immigrated to the US through DV lottery since 2016 as claimed by the viral video.
Conclusion
No, all the immigrants of Nepali origin living in the US will not be deported as part of Donald Trump’s promise to send back illegal immigrants from the US. People who reached the US by winning DV lottery since 2016 are not illegal immigrants and they immigrated to the US legally. The viral video is misleading.
Result: False
Sources
Kantipur Television/YouTube, Nov 8, 2020
BBC, Nov 19, 2024
Maiami Herald, June 10, 2020
CNN, Nov 11, 2024
US State Department
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Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
