Ben Za Min was working as a junior government clerk in Myanmar when the military seized power nearly five years ago, setting off a chain of events that would lead to his death 1,300 miles from home.
He quit his job in a small town in western Chin State and joined nationwide protests. When the junta cracked down and violence erupted throughout the country, he fled first to India and then, in 2023, to Malaysia, where he worked illegally in construction, making a modest living.
But his life was thrown into turmoil again after the Malaysian government, facing a surge of undocumented immigrants, declared 2025 to be “the year of enforcement” and ramped up arrests.
Immigration agents raided Mr. Ben Za Min’s worksite in northern Malaysia in mid-September, detaining him and a dozen others.
Three weeks later, he died at a hospital while in custody after a cut on his lower right leg turned septic. It is unclear how or when he was injured. He was sent to the nearby hospital for treatment at one point, returned to his cell, and then was admitted again right before he died, at age 32.
“I believe he wasn’t given proper medical treatment before being sent back,” said Lin, his sister, who lives in Myanmar and asked to be identified by one name because she feared reprisal. “I think they dismissed him as someone without documentation and treated him with no respect.”
His death adds to a toll of more than 300 undocumented migrants who have died in custody in Malaysia since 2020, according to government data provided to Parliament. Malaysia’s Home Affairs Ministry did not respond to questions about the death of Mr. Ben Za Min or the data.
Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of people from Myanmar have sought refuge in Malaysia in the hope of escaping ethnic cleansing and the brutal junta that now rules the country, where a civil war has raged for nearly five years. The number has risen since early last year, when Burmese authorities reinstated military conscription for men and women.
Malaysia does not grant political asylum to migrants, but it allows those who arrive illegally to live and work if they have been granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Similar to what has happened in the United States, officials in Malaysia have carried out more raids this year in immigrant communities. They have also sought to persuade undocumented migrants to return home voluntarily.
“The ministry will not compromise in the fight against the existence of illegal foreigners in the country,” Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution Ismail said in May.
Activists say that even some with refugee status have been arrested and detained for weeks. The U.N. agency has registered more than 211,000 refugees in Malaysia, the vast majority from Myanmar.
Officers have been arresting about 7,000 migrants a month, more than double the rate in recent years, said Yap Lay Sheng of the human rights group Fortify Rights.
“Many are held for prolonged periods in overcrowded facilities with filthy sanitation, poor ventilation, inadequate access to clean water, food and medical care,” he said. “Detainees face severe torture, both physical and psychological.”
Many detainees are Rohingya Muslims who fled what the United States and others have determined was a genocide conducted by the Myanmar military that began in 2016. Since then, more than a million Rohingya have escaped overseas, most to neighboring Bangladesh.
Myanmar does not consider them citizens, leaving them stateless. Some have been locked up in Malaysia for years with little hope of being freed, advocates say.
“It’s a very inhumane policy to lock up people who should be getting refugee status,” said Ramachelvam Manimuthu, the president of a prominent nonprofit in Malaysia, the National Human Rights Society. “There are heartbreaking stories: people who are sick in detention centers, people who have died in detention centers.”
The immigration department, which falls under the Home Ministry, did not respond to questions about allegations of mistreatment, physical abuse, medical neglect or inadequate food. But it denied claims of overcrowding and said its 20 detention centers are at about 90 percent capacity.
The department said some undocumented immigrants had remained in detention for prolonged periods for reasons beyond its control, including lack of valid travel documents or refusal of their country of origin to accept them.
Human rights advocates have also accused Malaysia of deporting thousands of asylum seekers from Myanmar since the coup, including military defectors, without giving the U.N. refugee agency a chance to assess their claims. Since 2019, Malaysia has barred the U.N. agency from visiting detention centers, limiting its ability to assess cases or inspect the facilities, the agency said.
The immigration department says that it welcomes the agency so long is it goes through an application process. It said the agency had been allowed in twice last year.
Another refugee from Myanmar, Sui Kyaw, 52, died in custody in January, less than four weeks after she was arrested on suspicion of trying to enter Malaysia illegally, said her son Lian Aung Thang.
Mr. Lian Aung Thang, who has refugee status in Malaysia, said his mother came to take care of another son, who was injured in a work accident. She was detained just after crossing the border. “My mother had no illness before and died so suddenly,” he said.
The authorities told him that his mother collapsed at the prison and died on the way to the hospital. When he went to collect her belongings, he said, her cell was extremely cold and there was no blanket. Her death certificate listed the cause as pneumonia.
“I truly believe that if she had received proper medical care promptly, she would not have died,” he said.
The ministry did not respond to questions about her death.
At the time of the coup in Myanmar, Mr. Ben Za Min was living in the town of Matupi, but he decided to leave as the economy started cratering, his relatives said. He eventually made his way south through Thailand to more prosperous Malaysia, mainly traveling by car and motorbike and crossing borders on foot.
He was one of the many ethnic Chin migrants who have come to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, where they have established a community with schools, churches and a kitchen for the needy. Mr. Ben Za Min found a job as an excavator driver.
His application for refugee status was still pending when he was arrested on Sept. 4, and sent to Pengkalan Chepa Prison. According to both his sister Ms. Lin and a cousin, Liankul Sang, he was placed in a cramped cell with more than 50 others.
In a call to Ms. Lin after he was detained, he said nothing about a cut on his leg, she said, leading her to believe the cut was minor or occurred later in custody.
An autopsy photo given to his family revealed that at some point he had received three or four stitches on his lower right leg.
More than two weeks after his arrest, he was sent to the hospital for treatment and was returned to his cell, his relatives said.
Three days later, on the evening of Sept. 25, he was sent back to the hospital where he died shortly after midnight. His death certificate listed the cause as septic shock.
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