Kerala Police have taken into custody 27 Bangladeshi illegal migrants from a single housing complex in North Paravur, marking the largest detention of illegal immigrants in a single operation in the state.
Since early January, the Ernakulam rural police have been conducting raids to track down Bangladeshi migrants. Intelligence agencies had been monitoring the influx of illegal migrants into Kerala for some time.
Acting on intelligence inputs, a team of 70 Kerala Police personnel raided a multi-storey building on the night of January 30. More than 50 individuals, claiming to be from West Bengal were detained. Among them, 27 confessed to being Bangladeshi nationals. The police are continuing to verify the identities and backgrounds of the others.
A source in the intelligence agency stated that while many of these migrants come for work, the possibility of radical elements from Bangladesh infiltrating cannot be ruled out. Officials suspect that some extremists may have entered India and reached states like Kerala—home to a significant Bengali-speaking migrant workforce—following the Shaikh Hasina government’s ban on Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh and its student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, under anti-terrorism laws last August. The group was proscribed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.
Intelligence agencies are also monitoring whether operatives linked to Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a militant Islamist organization banned by India in 2019, are attempting to use Kerala as a safe haven.
However, police sources told THE WEEK that so far no links to extremist groups have been found among the 27 migrants currently in custody. Notably, all of them entered India illegally and traveled to Kerala via Kolkata over the past two years.
According to the police, the migrants had been using forged documents, including Aadhaar cards, to stay and work in Kerala. Authorities are verifying their nationality using their Bengali dialect and digital evidence from their phones.
All of them were engaged in manual labour or working in shops. The police will be filing cases under forgery and other relevant sections before remanding them. Meanwhile, Operation Clean will continue as authorities intensify efforts to track down more illegal migrants.
