Chirayu Patel was filling out university applications when he found out that he was living illegally in the US. It made little sense to him — he remembers legally migrating from Ahmedabad to Chicago at the age of 11 when his father was granted a US work visa in 1994. However, when Patel applied to the universities, he needed a nine-digit social security number, a federal identification given only to US citizens and permanent residents. Without that number, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain a university scholarship or proper authorisation to work on campus. When Patel asked why he did not have such a number, his father confessed that they had overstayed their visa and were now living without any legal status in the US.“It felt like a wall. I did not know if I was going to make it,” Patel told ET Magazine. “For Indian parents, college is everything and to not attend would have crushed their hopes.”He decided to seek assistance from lawyers and eventually he obtained admission to the University of Illinois. Today Patel — and millions of others like him — face possible deportation because last month President Donald Trump ended the amnesty programme called DACA Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ) that allows Patel to remain in the US.“I am worried,” Patel said. “I haven’t been back to Ahmedabad since I left (in 1994). My Gujarati has gotten poor and I do not know what I would do there for work.”Patel is not alone. There are over 11 million people in the US who have either entered the US illegally, overstayed their visas, or are waiting for their US immigration papers to arrive. Indians represent the fastest growing group of illegal residents from Asia in America today. Trump refers to these residents as “illegal”, a term considered by immigration rights activists to be reductive and offensive as it implies that the individual — as opposed to the actions the person has taken — is unlawful. Patel prefers the term “undocumented”.The problem of anti-immigrant sentiment has spiraled out of control as of late. During last year’s US presidential elections, Trump frequently targeted immigrants, even making fun of the way Indians speak at call centers. As a result, hate crimes against immigrants and non-white Americans have skyrocketed.A few weeks ago, Rajesh and Vidhya Patnaik, both Indian immigrants who live in the Midwestern state of Indiana, saw their shop vandalised and spray-painted with anti-Hindu slurs. In February, two Indians were shot in Kansas in an apparent hate crime, one of whom, Srinivas Kuchibhotla , was killed. Kuchibhotla’s widow faced deportation because she was only permitted to be in the US on account of her husband’s visa. For now, she has got a one-year visa to stay in the US.And yet, when most think of undocumented residents in the US, few think of Indians like Patel. He is a university graduate who works at a real estate company and lives an uneventful life in Chicago. “People are surprised when they hear I am undocumented,” he said. “Often Indians and Indian-Americans do not know there are undocumented Indians in the US.”At the moment, about half of undocumented residents in the US are from Mexico but the fastest growing segment of undocumented Americans are those from Asia and from India in particular. According to CNN, there are 1.45 million undocumented Asians in the US. The Pew Research Center, which tracks this data, reports that there were 5,00,000 unauthorised immigrants from India living in the US in 2014, up from 3,50,000 in 2009 — a 43% increase. However, the Migration Policy Institute, a NGO based in Washington DC, estimates that the number of undocumented Indians in the US might be much lower, at around 2,67,000.That the statistics vary greatly is one of the challenges, Karthick Ramakrishnan argues. Ramakrishnan is a professor at the University of California, Riverside, and the founder of AAPI Data, which seeks to make data about Asian Americans more accessible. In an interview with The Washington Post, he said, “Most estimates show Indian and Chinese immigrants to be the largest Asian undocumented groups, followed by Filipinos and Koreans. And, yet, research on these communities has been very sparse. Are most of them overstaying tourist visas or other types of visas like student visas and temporary work visas? What kind of work do they do? We don’t know the answer to these basic questions.”In addition to the need for more data, immigrant rights activists told ET Magazine that more infrastructure needs to be put in place to support undocumented Indians in the US. While some immigrants — including Indians — do enter the US illegally through Mexico or Canada, many come to the US with proper paperwork and then overextend their visa. This was the case with Patel’s family, which had a valid work visa. When his father lost his job, he hired a lawyer to handle their immigration case who, in Chirayu’s words, “messed up the case”.This is all too common: a new Indian immigrant to the US, perhaps not fluent in English, seeks help from an attorney who ends up ruining their case. The result is that the individual has to take up a low-paying, unregistered job. Today Patel’s father works as a cashier; his mother as a secretary.The US immigration system can seem unfair and needlessly cruel. Patel wishes he could see his family in Gujarat but he has given up, at least for now, as undocumented residents in the US are not permitted to leave the country. “My grandmother is sick Ahmedabad,” Patel said. “But we have already accepted the fact that we may not see her before she passes.”Suman Raghunathan, the Executive Director of SAALT, added that while there are around 17,000 individuals from India in the US who eligible for DACA, many do not apply because of fear. In an interview with ET Magazine, she said, “Unfortunately, due to the legacy of racial profiling policies in (the US), particularly after 9/11 via the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which forced over 80,000 men from 24 predominantly Muslim countries to register with the US government and placed 13,000 into deportation proceedings, ultimately leading to zero terrorism-related convictions, there is a significant lack of trust in government immigration programs on the part of the South Asian American community. “While DACA eligibility is high in our communities, many have been cautious about applying and those who have are constantly worried about securing renewals every few years so they can remain in the country. This is why our application numbers look very low.”In pic: Defend DACA march in Los Angeles, USRaghunathan estimates that the number of undocumented Indians in the US is about 4,50,000. The vast majority of these are not eligible for DACA and are often at much greater risk of being deported. Some are without legal status because they overstayed their tourist or student visa; some made clerical error on their forms; others are from broken marriages. Through an immigration attorney, this writer contacted Nisha, a 43-year old Punjabi woman who lives in New York and agreed to speak with me on the condition that I change her name. Nisha came to the US when she married an Indian-American in her mid 30s. The plan was for her to apply for US citizenship and to start a family. When her marriage ended, her husband kicked her out, leaving her scrambling to find a legal foothold in the US. “I was completely dependent on him. I didn’t even have a US bank account,” Nisha said. When I asked her why he did not apply for citizenship for her or why she did not seek a US lawyer after her divorce, her voice quivered. “I had no money. I didn’t even have a mobile phone,” she said.After her divorce, Nisha found a job working in an Indian restaurant in New York, being paid illegally in cash under the table. Today she is talking to a lawyer and she might be able to remain in the US, if her lawyer has his way. But she does not see things improving and moving back to India is not an option. “My family does not want me back. The moment I told them I am getting a divorce, they said I failed them,” she said.At the moment, there are an estimated four million people in the US like Nisha who are in legal limbo and are waiting for the US government to determine their legal status. It is unclear how many of those four million are of Indian origin. For Nisha and thousands of other Indians in the US, their situation might have been avoided had they sought help sooner. But that is costly. It is also difficult, Nisha said, to determine which lawyer is reliable and which one is fake.The problem, one immigration attorney explains, is that the US immigration system is broken and has been broken for some time, even long before Trump. “Neither Republicans or Democrats want to fix this issue because undocumented immigrants do not vote,” the attorney said, who did not want her name mentioned. “In court, I have never seen the type of hostility I see today towards Indians. If you are brown and have a ‘foreign sounding name’, you are going to be looked at as a suspect. It was tough after 9/11. It is worse now.”It is an unprecedented time for Indians in the US but some are more vulnerable than others. For high-skilled Indian workers on H1-B visas, if Trump eliminates the programme — as he said he might — the effect could be disastrous. According to US government data from 2016, there are 1,26,000 Indians in the US on H1-B visas. Since Trump’s win, a record number of Indians in the US have applied for jobs back in India. For the 5,500 Indian DACA recipients like Chirayu Patel, hope rests with the US Congress passing legislation to safeguard their rights — something that, at least at the moment, seems unlikely, given Trump’s desire to curb immigration to the US.In pic: Rally for Refugees in USThe tens of thousands of undocumented Indians in the US who are daily-wage earners, such as those who work in the back of kitchens like Nisha, face two choices: deportation or hiding. Patel has vowed to keep educating people about what it means to be an undocumented Indian but Nisha is pursuing a different strategy. She is trying to appear as invisible as possible, paying everything in cash, from her rent to her mobile phone. It is not the life Nisha wanted for herself.“I should have never come to the US,” Nisha said. “Knowing what I know now, why would I move to this country? But I am here now. What to do?”(The author is the News Editor at Hyphen Magazine and a fellow at Kundiman)