Malaysia's Mass Deportation of Myanmar Refugees Sparks Fear Among Tens of Thousands Still in Country

The Malaysian government this week deported nearly 1,500 refugees back to Myanmar, the first phase of a stated plan to return at least 5,000 people under an agreement reached with Myanmar's military government. The move, confirmed on Tuesday, has left tens of thousands of other Myanmar refugees in Malaysia asking a single anxious question: who will be next?

Among those fielding the panic is a refugee leader identified only as Raf, who told Al Jazeera his phone has barely stopped ringing in recent days. He said he now receives more than a hundred calls a day, almost all of them following the same desperate pattern.

"They are crying, asking me to do something," Raf said, describing the mood among a community that has watched Malaysia — for years a relative sanctuary — turn sharply against them.

The deportation was not an isolated operation. It unfolded alongside an intensifying campaign of immigration raids on refugee communities, which according to advocates have produced more than 50,000 detentions of refugees this year alone. Those working with the community say the tempo of enforcement changed markedly after Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced the repatriation agreement with Myanmar's military rulers in June.

"[We've seen] a sharp increase. Raids are happening every single day. There's up to 50 raids or more happening every day," said Heidy Quah, founder and executive director of the Malaysian nonprofit Refuge for the Refugees.

The government's own figures broadly support that account. Home Affairs Minister Saifuddin Nasution told local media that authorities had carried out more than 9,700 operations between the start of the year and September 17 — an average of roughly 37 per day. The Ministry of Home Affairs says more than 10,000 Myanmar nationals are currently held in Malaysia's immigration depots.

The scale of the refugee population at stake is considerable. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Malaysia hosts more than 215,000 refugees in total, of whom nearly 194,000 come from Myanmar. That group includes more than 126,000 Rohingya, alongside close to 16,000 people from the Chin community and about 33,000 from other Myanmar ethnic groups. Smaller numbers of refugees from Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Iraq are also present.

One striking feature of the first deportation cohort is who was not on it. Community leaders told Al Jazeera that they had not identified any Rohingya among the nearly 1,500 people sent back on Tuesday, saying most of those deported belonged to other Myanmar ethnic minorities who are more likely to hold valid national identification documents. That distinction matters because Myanmar's government formally denies Rohingya citizenship, treating them instead as Bangladeshi migrants despite their long history in the country and their distinct ethnic identity.

"The Rohingyas are a problem for deportation because Myanmar denies their citizenship," Raf said. "So I don't think that Myanmar will agree and accept all those Rohingyas."

The Rohingya have endured repeated military crackdowns, including a 2017 campaign of violence that rights groups have widely described as genocide and that drove hundreds of thousands of people to flee into Bangladesh, Malaysia, India and other neighbouring states. The community's stateless status means that, paradoxically, its members may be less likely to be deported under the current arrangement — but advocates warn that uncertainty offers little real comfort, since they remain targets of both enforcement sweeps and public hostility.

That hostility has been fuelled in part by social media. Community leaders say this year's raids appear to have concentrated on locations that were singled out in anti-refugee videos posted online, in which content creators filmed refugee-populated neighbourhoods and portrayed them as sources of disorder. The videos have been shared thousands of times across platforms including Threads, TikTok and Facebook. Al Jazeera contacted Malaysia's Immigration Department to verify whether such videos were linked to the raids but had not received a response at the time of publication, and accounts that posted or amplified the anti-refugee material did not respond to requests for comment either.

The enforcement surge comes at a moment when the organisations that normally cushion refugees from destitution are themselves in retreat. Quah said the closure of the United States Agency for International Development in July 2025 dramatically reduced the resources available to groups providing basic services such as healthcare. Funding cuts then rippled through United Nations agencies, including the UNHCR operation in Malaysia, which shed a significant number of staff as part of global retrenchments last year.

The agency's financial strain is acute and openly acknowledged. On Tuesday, UNHCR said it is confronting a $5.79bn funding gap and that, as of July, it had received only 32 percent of the money it needs for the year. In Malaysia, Quah said, the practical consequence is thinner protection for refugees and a growing risk of exploitation — including for people who hold UNHCR documentation. "Even UNHCR cardholders are arrested and remanded for about 14 days [while the] cards are verified," she said.

She cited the case of an asylum-seeking woman who had an appointment scheduled this month with UNHCR representatives but was detained before she could attend. Immigration authorities demanded a letter from the organisation confirming her asylum-seeker status. Although UNHCR verified that she was indeed seeking asylum, Quah said the woman remains in detention.

UNHCR and rights groups in Malaysia have called on the government to halt the deportations, pointing to the continuing violence inside Myanmar. The day before Tuesday's operation, an air strike by Myanmar's military was reported to have killed at least 33 people in Rakhine state, the historic homeland of the Rohingya. The Arakan Army said those killed included vendors, shoppers and pedestrians. In June, the United Nations said Myanmar's military was responsible for more than 700 civilian deaths.

For the refugees still in Malaysia, the combination of daily raids, shrinking aid and a government committed to sending thousands of people back into a country at war has produced a climate of sustained dread. Raf said the calls keep coming, and he has few answers to offer. The people reaching out to him are not asking about policy or agreements — they are asking whether they will be next to board a bus and, eventually, a Myanmar navy ship.