Robiul Hasan stood at the baqalah counter in a quiet Riyadh neighbourhood on an April evening, counting riyals for his iftar purchases. The 42-year-old construction worker had done this hundreds of times during his 15 years in Saudi Arabia.
This time, however, security patrol officers entered, demanded his iqama (official residence permit for foreign nationals), without considering its eight-month validity, and arrested him anyway.
Two months later, he arrived in Dhaka. He had a question that hundreds of deportees were asking: “What was my fault? I showed my iqama. They did not consider it.”
Saudi authorities conducted an inspection campaign between April 23 and 29, 2026, recording 11,300 violations across the kingdom, including 6,244 related to residency issues.
Interviews with dozens of returnees arriving in Dhaka during April reveal something more upsetting than an administrative sweep. They recount a relentless campaign that erased the line between documented and undocumented workers.
The enforcement campaign can’t be separated from the broader geopolitical earthquake that shook the Middle East beginning in late February.
Renewed hostilities in Lebanon since March have caused massive civilian displacement and humanitarian needs across the region.
Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed to most commercial shipping as Iran’s Defense Council warned that any attack on Iranian coastal territory would trigger mine-laying across Gulf sea lanes.
These regional shocks created an immediate peril for Saudi Arabia’s three million Bangladeshi workers.
Security tightened, and Bangladeshi workers became the fastest proof of control as Gulf uncertainty surged.
This Middle East crisis threatened remittances, business, and the livelihoods of families everywhere.
A system designed for exploitation
Bangladeshi recruitment agencies operate as critical links in this chain, extracting enormous fees while providing minimal protection.
While government-approved migration costs a little over a lakh,, workers with free visas spend around Tk 5 lakh on average -- nearly five times the legal amount.
More alarmingly, 43% of these workers fail to find employment upon arrival.
At the core of the crisis lies what it calls the “free visa” system -- a predatory arrangement that has enriched middlemen while devastating worker families for decades.
One returnee described the trap’s mechanics: “I went to Saudi Arabia on what they call a free visa. I spent Tk 450,000 getting there. I was an irregular worker from day one. I had to sit idle for two months just waiting for work, then another three months without an income.”
Md Riaz Uddin Khan, an academic and migration expert, addressed the recent plight of stranded workers, stating: “The concept of a ‘free visa’ is profoundly misleading. When companies recruit workers on restrictive three-month visas, they are not offering genuine remittance opportunities.”
He explained the structural barriers: “These workers mostly fail to secure themselves into a formal recruitment process, as the visa architecture itself bars stable employment and visa regularization.”
Khan further highlighted the ripple effects on Bangladesh’s migration profile: “This floating status sends a negative message, restricting our future migration potential and remittance sustainability.”
Those who typically work for employers other than their official sponsors are technically illegal under Saudi labour law, despite holding valid iqamas. When authorities conducted their week-long sweep, these workers became easy targets.
When a resident and work permit fail to secure
Beyond the free visa trap, the iqama itself has become a deportation mechanism.
The residence permit fee now stands at 11,000-12,000 Saudi riyals annually, more than many workers earn in domestic work, construction, or cleaning jobs.
This astronomical sum has created a shadow population of undocumented workers whose permits lapsed because employers refused or couldn’t afford renewal.
Employers delay paying iqama fees, leaving workers in legal limbo until permits expire. When these workers venture outside for work or daily needs, police detention and deportation follow swiftly.
However, the April inspection campaign revealed something more sinister: Even valid iqamas offered no protection.
“I had my iqama in my pocket. It was valid for another eight months.” I had been working legally for a year and a half. The security patrol stopped me, I handed them the card, and they literally threw it on the hood of their vehicle and put me in the van.”
Enforcement timing and religious context
The most alarming dimension of the April 2026 crackdown involved accusations of begging against workers -- even those holding valid iqamas.
“I had just finished a shift and went to a hotel to buy Iiftar and they arrested me right at the counter and officially charged me with begging. I had money in my pocket from my wages. It is an easy way to bypass the labour violation paperwork and fast-track a deportation.”
Another worker faced the same accusation: “I had just received a new iqama that had at least one and a half years of validity., yet I was accused of begging.”
Workers who became unemployed through no fault of their own -- because the middlemen sold them free visas without actual jobs -- find themselves visible in public spaces without an apparent legitimate purpose.
This visibility itself becomes criminal in the eyes of the enforcement authorities.
Saudi Arabia implemented a temporary ban on work visa quotas for 14 countries, including Bangladesh, specifically targeting individuals who might attempt unauthorized hajj participation.
The religious calendar thus became a weapon of enforcement, as any worker with irregular documentation faced heightened scrutiny during this period.
Workers on free visas commonly violate labour regulations by working for employers other than their official sponsors without obtaining required transfer documentation.
Workers become illegal when they work at places other than their sponsor’s without no-objection certificates and proper transfer processes. This widespread practice, nonetheless, constitutes a clear labour law violation.
One on-field reporter covering returnee complaints explained the enforcement logic: “If you are not physically sitting inside your sponsor’s office or home, you are suspicious. If you change professions because your sponsor isn’t paying you, or if you step outside your designated area to find secondary work to pay off your debts, your movement is automatically viewed as a labour violation.”
Additionally, some workers overstay their visit visas, using religious pilgrimage permits to extend their job searches. Authorities specifically targeted such individuals as the hajj season approached, viewing visa overstays as both immigration violations and potential security concerns.
However, focusing solely on workers’ infractions obscures the systemic violations that create conditions for such incidents. During one year, at least 573,000 foreign nationals out of more than 994,000 arrested for residency, border, and labour violations were returned to their home countries.
Detention conditions for those arrested reflect the system’s fundamental inhumanity. Workers detained during the April campaign experienced ill-treatment.
“I couldn’t communicate with my employers, not even my relatives from there; I was entirely helpless, though I am not involved in any mistake,” one deportee stated.
The discrimination extended to processing times.
“If you are a Pakistani national, you sit in jail for three to seven days, and your embassy processes you out,” one returnee observed. “If you are Bangladeshi, you sit for at least a month, often two, with absolutely no one coming to speed up your case.”
Workers during April 2026 witnessed intersecting factors: geopolitical crisis providing enforcement justification, hajj timing intensifying scrutiny, free visa system creating vulnerable irregular workers, iqama costs generating mass illegality, and genuine labour violations providing legal cover for mass detention.
Together, these elements created perfect conditions for the security patrol that swept thousands of Bangladeshi workers, disrupting families and communities while leaving fundamental structural problems entirely unaddressed.
Until reforms target root causes rather than symptoms, such enforcement campaigns will continue devastating the very workers whose labour builds Saudi Arabia and the Gulf’s ambitious future.
Zulker Naeen is a Research Coordinator, Center for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS) and Adjunct Faculty, Department of Media Studies and Journalism (MSJ), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). Views expressed are the writer’s own.