After serving time in a detention center, they say, many are taken to a no man's land near the border with Thailand where human traffickers await their arrival.
If they can pay 1,500 ringgit, or about $450, the migrants say, the traffickers will smuggle them back to Kuala Lumpur where the cycle of harassment, potential detention and deportation begins again.
If they cannot pay, the migrants say, they may be sold as laborers to fishing boats or forced into the sex trade. Some return years later, the migrants say. Others simply disappear.
Irene Fernandez, a Malaysian who heads a local migrants' rights group called Tenaganita, said victims sometimes call from the border begging for money to pay the traffickers.
"It's a conflict for us because we cannot support any form of trafficking, " she said. "At the same time, protection of life is equally important."
The best she can honorably do, she said, is to notify the immigrant communities in Kuala Lumpur, where people barely have enough money to feed themselves, and hope they can find the means to save their friends.
Terrorized by Rela, many of the migrants have left their apartments in the city and built shacks of leaves and branches in the surrounding jungle.
But Rela pursues them here as well, the migrants say.
"Some jungle sites are periodically cleared by local authorities, the inhabitants are displaced, valuables taken away and at times shelters are burned to the ground," the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders s
