"Gulf states ramp up arrest and deportation campaigns," 5 Jan 2023

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait have intensified efforts to identify and deport migrants with irregular status in recent months. Many migrants enter into an irregular status due to the Kafala system, under which employers possess near total control over migrant workers’ legal status. Workers can be pushed into an irregular status if employers fail to obtain or extend their residency. Constraints on changing employers mean that workers who need to leave an exploitative workplace are also often forced into irregularity. Rather than reforming the labour-migration system meaningfully, the Gulf states periodically launch deportation campaigns, occasionally preceded by amnesty campaigns, to reduce the population of undocumented workers...

Migrants rarely have any recourse to challenge their detention or deportation sentences, and this is especially the case in mass deportation campaigns where there are no individualised reviews. Migrants caught up in these campaigns are screened as potential victims of trafficking, nor assessed for risk of abuse upon return to their origin country. MR has previously reported on likely cases of refoulement involving Cameroonian workers in the UAE and Ethiopian workers in Saudi Arabia.