15 people arrested in Operation Hardball were living in the U.S. illegally; gang recruiters target visa applicants

15 people arrested hard ball action — The U.S. cracked down on three organized crime networks with ties to India — who were living illegally in the country when they were arrested. The indictment against one of the networks, Bhagwanpuria Enterprises, separately alleges that its recruitment coordinators in India specifically targeted potential members who were eligible to apply for student or foreign work visas.

The revelations have refocused attention on illegal immigration and Indian nationals abusing legal immigration pathways – an ongoing political flashpoint in the United States that has become more acute amid the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown.

The revelations follow three federal indictments filed this week against the Bishnoi, Bhagwanpuria and Dhanda networks, which are accused of carrying out organized crime operations including murder, extortion and drug trafficking in the United States, Canada and India.

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“We have three indictments. The 15 defendants in the United States are in the United States illegally,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said at a news conference on Tuesday. Officials said that of the 24 people arrested in the operation, 14 were arrested in the United States, three in Canada and one in Spain, with seven people already in custody when Operation Hardball officially launched.

The Bhagwanpuria indictment details how the organized crime group allegedly built a team to meet the needs of this pipeline. Recruitment coordinators in India lure minors to join the business with promises of money, fame, power and routes abroad, and specifically look for potential employees who can apply for student or work visas. The indictment alleges that loyal members and associates in India were rewarded and sent to conduct operations in the United States and Canada.

Officials specifically detailed the immigration status of both defendants. Gudev Singh, an associate of the Bhagwan Priya gang, faces racketeering, drug trafficking and illegal arms sales charges after he allegedly tried to extort victims while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which cracks down on illegal immigration.

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Separately, Gurlal Singh, a 22-year-old Bhagwanpuria gang member living in Stockton, California, allegedly threatened a victim and revealed the victim’s name to a corrupt law enforcement officer in Punjab.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said Thursday they did not have any information to reveal whether those charged entered the U.S. through legal means, such as student or work visas. “We have no comment on how illegal aliens enter the United States. All we know is that they are here and are being charged as part of the indictment.”

The spokesman confirmed that American citizens were among those arrested during Operation Hardball.

Encounters between U.S. border authorities and Indian immigrants peaked at nearly 97,000 in fiscal year 2023, and the Pew Research Center estimates that about 725,000 Indians currently live in the United States illegally.

Since then, the trend of illegal immigration has reversed sharply. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data reviewed by HT, the number of illegal Indian immigrants encountered at the border dropped by 77% in the first nine months of Trump’s administration.

Between January and September 2024, U.S. border agencies recorded 66,524 encounters with illegal immigrants from India; the number fell to 15,551 during the same period in 2025.

A large portion of illegal immigration from India to the United States can be traced to Punjab—a state with which all three organized crime networks named in Operation Hardball maintain ties.

Devesh Kapur and Abby Budiman of Johns Hopkins University wrote in a 2025 study, citing data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an immigration data research organization: “Data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows that since 2001 Punjabi-speaking immigrants have been the largest group of Indo-Aryan or Dravidian-speaking immigrants involved in asylum applications and U.S. immigration court proceedings since 2017 strongly suggest that individuals from the Punjab region of India constitute the majority of Indian immigrants encountered at the U.S. border.”