"ASEAN Parliamentarians Voice Concern on Malaysian Immigration Crackdown", 12 July 2017

Southeast Asian lawmakers...called on Malaysia to treat undocumented workers fairly and respect their human rights as Kuala Lumpur carried on with an immigration crackdown... 

...Immigration agents had detained 3,323 workers...during the first 12 days of the crackdown...

The detainees are mostly from other countries in Southeast and South Asia. They include 1,230 Bangladeshis, 825 Indonesians, 273 Myanmar nationals, 119 Vietnamese, 123 Thais and 95 Filipinos, and the rest are from other countries...

The ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) issued a statement expressing concern about the round-up taking place in Malaysia.

“A desire to decrease the number of undocumented workers in the country can never be an excuse to further victimize the vulnerable,” Mu Sochua, an APHR board member and member of the Cambodian National Assembly, said in the statement.

As thousands of new detainees are sent to be locked up in Malaysia’s overcrowded immigration detention centers, the crackdown risks worsening conditions in those facilities that are already dire, APHR said.

Most of the undocumented immigrants work in construction, palm oil plantations, factories and cleaning services, doing physically taxing menial jobs, which locals shy away from and describe as “3D” – dangerous, difficult and dirty.