Malaysian authorities yesterday detained more than 100 Rohingya Muslim asylum seekers who had ‌gathered outside the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Kuala Lumpur, after being evicted from their settlement in the northern state of Penang.

According to a report by the New Straits Times, the group was transferred in four police vehicles from outside the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at around 8:20 p.m. yesterday, along with “luggage and personal belongings.”

The paper today quoted Kuala Lumpur police chief Fadil Marsus as saying that 113 refugees, including 110 Rohingya, were being held at police headquarters. Fadil also said checks conducted during the documentation process at the police headquarters found that all the Rohingya refugees possessed valid UNHCR documents.

The refugees said they had traveled to the UNHCR office after being driven out of their homes by local residents in the northern state of Penang on Sunday, and were seeking advice on resettlement, Reuters reported.

The news agency cited Penang police as saying that the Rohingya had “voluntarily moved” to Kuala Lumpur ​with the assistance of state and federal authorities.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said yesterday that he had directed police and immigration authorities to “take firm action” against the refugees in order “to control the situation and ensure public peace is maintained.” In an accompanying video, he said, “No one has the right to take over any part of the city.”

The incident comes amid a rising tide of popular hostility and online hate speech toward Rohingya refugees. Last month, more than half a million people signed a petition on Change.org calling for the removal of Rohingya refugees from Malaysia, which followed an outraged online response to cows being slaughtered by Rohingya refugees for the festival of Eid al-Adha. Prominent public figures have since described the Rohingya as “criminals” and “intruders” and likened them to a “cancer” on the country, while social media posts have encouraged violence against the Rohingya or encouraged users to report the locations of Rohingya refugees to the authorities.

Rohingya asylum seekers have arrived in Malaysia steadily over the past two decades, and particularly since 2017, when an ethnic cleansing campaign by the Myanmar military pushed more than 740,000 from Rakhine State into Bangladesh. Around 126,000 Rohingya are currently registered with UNHCR, more than half of the total, but Malaysia does not recognize the Rohingya as refugees, and, in line with the growing public hostility, has in recent years tightened the enforcement of its immigration laws against them.

Last week, Malaysia ordered UNHCR to temporarily stop registering new refugees in the country, as it begins operating its own system for managing asylum-seekers. The system, known as DPP, is set to apply much more stringent criteria than UNHCR about who can be granted refugee status in the country.

In this context, the online hate campaign has led to growing government scrutiny of Rohingya communities, and prompted investigations, raids, and the closures of Rohingya-linked schools and businesses, Reuters reported yesterday. At least nine Rohingya schools have so far been forced to shut nationwide, it stated, many of them because of rising harassment and abuse, including of children.

According to Malaysian media reports, the group of Rohingya that was detained outside the UNHCR office had been forced to leave their settlement in the village of Kuala Muda in Penang on Sunday. The New Straits Times reported that around 500 Rohingya vacated the village “peacefully”, “after villagers, authorities and members of the refugee community honored a month-long agreement to relocate.” It said that while the community “rarely caused problems,” the arrival of around 25 Rohingya a few months ago had prompted villagers to intervene.

“This transfer was carried out due to economic and territorial competition that arose ​following an increase in the Rohingya population in the area,” Seberang Perai Utara district police chief Anuar Abdul Rahman said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

While local officials said that there was “no riots, arguments, or violence” during the Rohingyas’ departure, one journalist posted on X that Kuala Muda had subsequently declared itself a “Rohingya-free area.”

As Alex Howlett reported for The Diplomat recently, the online hate campaign against the Rohingya has centered on similar narratives that accompanied their expulsion from Rakhine State in Myanmar – in particular, the toxic notion that Rohingya families reproduce at a far faster rate than Malaysian families.

Another parallel is the accusation that big social media companies, including Facebook’s parent company Meta, have failed to take quick enough action on hate speech posted on their platforms. A spokesperson for the advocacy group Article 19, which has previously expressed its concerns about the surge in hate speech against Rohingya, told Reuters that despite their policies on harmful content, enforcement by firms such as Meta and TikTok is inconsistent, while their AI moderation tools often allow hateful content to slip through the cracks.

Facebook in particular has been accused of failing to curb the spread of hateful speech in the run-up to the mass expulsion of Rohingya from Myanmar in 2017. Indeed, one group of Rohingya survivors initiated a class action against Meta in 2021, arguing that Facebook helped spread hate speech, misinformation, and incitement to violence and thereby “amounted to a substantial cause, and eventual perpetuation of, the Rohingya genocide.” The case was dismissed by a U.S. court in April.

Human rights groups have since condemned the Malaysian government’s detention of the Rohingya and called for greater protections of the vulnerable population. Bryony Lau, ‌deputy Asia ⁠director at Human Rights Watch, said that the Malaysian authorities “should prioritize protecting refugees who have been evicted from their homes instead of terrifying them further by detaining them.”

Amnesty International Malaysia’s spokesperson Divya Shesshsan Balakrishnan added, “Malaysia cannot build a credible refugee protection system while simultaneously treating refugees as people to be rounded up, detained, and removed.”