--- title: "Malaysia Deports Nearly 1,500 Refugees to Myanmar as Raids Spread Fear Among Those Left" description: "The first returns under a deal with Myanmar’s military government included 27 children, and 5,000 more are to be sent back." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-02T08:14:18Z modified: 2026-10-02T13:16:37Z url: https://rews.cc/a/malaysia-deports-nearly-1-500-refugees-to-myanmar-as-raids-s-45ce7a language: en tags: ["refugees", "myanmar", "deportation", "human-rights", "immigration", "asia"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Malaysia Deports Nearly 1,500 Refugees to Myanmar as Raids Spread Fear Among Those Left *The first returns under a deal with Myanmar’s military government included 27 children, and 5,000 more are to be sent back.* By rews desk · October 2, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/malaysia-deports-nearly-1-500-refugees-to-myanmar-as-raids-s-45ce7a ## In brief - Malaysia deported nearly 1,500 refugees to Myanmar on Tuesday under a plan to send back at least 5,000 - More than 50,000 refugees have been detained in Malaysia this year as raids escalated; 10,000 Myanmar nationals are in depots - No Rohingya were identified among the first deportees; Myanmar denies them citizenship - Aid for refugees shrank after the USAID closure; UNHCR faces a $5.79 billion funding gap - Rights groups questioned the “voluntary” label, noting 27 children were among those deported Malaysia deported nearly 1,500 refugees to Myanmar by ship on Tuesday, the first returns under a repatriation agreement with the country’s military government, a move that has spread fear through refugee communities across the country, Al Jazeera reported. The deportation is part of a stated plan to send back at least 5,000 refugees, and it came as immigration raids on refugee neighborhoods have escalated. Raf, a leader of refugees from Myanmar living in Malaysia, said he now fields more than 100 calls a day. “They are crying, asking me to do something,” he told Al Jazeera. More than 50,000 refugees have been detained in Malaysia this year alone, and those working with refugees said the raids have grown more frequent since June, when Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim announced the repatriation agreement with Myanmar. “\[We’ve seen\] 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 nonprofit Refuge for the Refugees. Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution told local media that the government carried out more than 9,700 such operations from the start of the year through Sept. 17, an average of 37 a day. More than 10,000 Myanmar nationals are now held in immigration depots, according to the Home Ministry. Malaysia is home to more than 215,000 refugees, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Nearly 194,000 of them are from Myanmar, including more than 126,000 Rohingya, nearly 16,000 Chin and 33,000 from other Myanmar communities, alongside smaller numbers of Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Afghans, Syrians, Sri Lankans, Palestinians and Iraqis. The Rohingya have been the target of widespread hate speech on Malaysian social media in recent months. No Rohingya have been identified among the first group deported on Tuesday, community leaders told Al Jazeera; many of those sent back are from other ethnic minorities, who are more likely to hold valid national identification documents. “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.” Myanmar officially treats the Rohingya as Bangladeshi immigrants, and the army’s crackdowns on the minority — including a wave of violence in 2017 that many rights groups have described as genocide — sent hundreds of thousands fleeing to Bangladesh, Malaysia, India and other neighboring countries. Community leaders also said this year’s raids appear to have targeted locations shown in anti-refugee videos in which content creators filmed refugee-populated areas and portrayed them as hubs of chaos. The videos have been shared thousands of times on platforms such as Threads, TikTok and Facebook. Al Jazeera said the Immigration Department did not respond to a request to verify the link, and accounts that posted anti-refugee material also did not respond. The hostility has coincided with a sharp decline in aid. The closure of the United States Agency for International Development in July 2025 shrank resources for groups providing refugees with health care and other basics, Ms. Quah said. “Then slowly, United Nations organisations were being defunded, and even within the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Malaysia, they lost a lot of staff,” she said. The agency said on Tuesday that it faces a $5.79 billion funding gap and had received 32 percent of the money it needs this year as of July. In Malaysia, Ms. Quah said, even UNHCR cardholders are arrested and held for about 14 days while their cards are verified; one asylum-seeking woman remains in detention even after the agency confirmed her status, she said. Rights groups have urged Malaysia to stop the deportations while violence continues in Myanmar. A day before the ships left, an air strike by Myanmar’s military reportedly killed at least 33 people in Rakhine state; the Arakan Army said the dead included vendors, shoppers and pedestrians. In June, the United Nations said Myanmar’s military was responsible for more than 700 civilian deaths over a six-month election period that began in August last year. The Human Rights Commission of Malaysia said the principle of nonrefoulement, which bars returning people to a place where they face a real risk of persecution or torture, is part of customary international law and binds Malaysia even though it has not joined the 1951 Refugee Convention. The commission noted that Tuesday’s deportation included 27 children, some reportedly as young as eight. “No child should be returned to danger. Their safety, dignity and best interests must come first,” it said. Rights groups also disputed the government’s description of the returns as voluntary. “While authorities say the returns are voluntary, those returned had been held in immigration detention. This raises serious questions about whether decisions to return were genuinely free and informed,” said Edem Wosornu, the UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner for protection. The Malaysian government said those deported were chosen from a list of names shared by Myanmar’s government in an official diplomatic note. The refugee agency said it had no access to the returnees and was “therefore, not in a position to independently ascertain the voluntariness of their decisions to return.” Community leaders told Al Jazeera the ships are expected to arrive in Yangon on Sunday. “After that, we will \[learn\] whether they are allowed to leave the port safely \[or are detained\],” said one leader, who requested anonymity because of the rise in violence toward refugees in Malaysia. Even those allowed out of the port may spend months or years in Yangon, the leader said, because travel across the country remains unsafe. The deportations come as Malaysia has also promoted a Refugee Registration Document programme, started in 2015, that is supposed to give refugees official documentation. Raf said he would welcome it if registration leads to work, education and health care. “If these three things are provided, I think that’s a good solution for temporary refugees staying here,” he said.