IPOH, July 2 — When Immigration officers burst into a construction site in Menglembu Impian Industrial Area yesterday, Juhartati Mahmud, 31, an Indonesian worker, knew her time in Malaysia was coming to its end.

"I didn’t bother to run. I knew I would get caught,” she said, revealing that this was the first time she had been nabbed in an Immigration raid.

Juhartati said she was aware of the E-kad programme but she had trusted her employers to take care of it.

"My boss told me that they would handle the application. So I left it to them and waited for them to get back to us.”

Juhartati admitted that she did not have a valid work permit but chose to come to Malaysia with her husband to support their family.

"I came here seven years ago via an agent. I was placed at a construction site with my husband. Our family is not doing well financially and we have a five-year-old daughter back in Indonesia,” she said.

Illegal workers detained during an operation in Kampung Badang, Kota Baru, Kelantan, yesterday. — Bernama pic

Juhartati said she can earn RM50 per day working at the construction site.   

In Klang, a female worker of a packaging factory in Klang, who requested anonymity, also claimed her employer did not inform them about the E-kad application deadline.

"We were not told by our employers that the E-kad had a deadline. When we asked our employers to settle it, they would brush us off and told us not to worry so much,” she said.

Many workers who spoke to Malay Mail during the raids in Selangor, Penang, Perak and Johor claimed that they were unaware of the E-kad or had trusted that their employers would apply for the document for them.

Many of them had endured tremendous hardship to come to Malaysia in search of a better life and their struggle never seemed to end.

Segregated from the rest of the workers rounded up in Klang yesterday were five women, including a young woman clad in T-shirt and jeans, with a shawl around her head.

She said her name was Muji, 34, from Malang, Indonesia.

In a voice barely above a whisper, Muji said she had been in Malaysia for the past seven years.

Immigrations officers screening foreign workers at a plastic factory in Bukit Mertajam, Penang. — Picture by Sayuti Zainuddin

"I work in the nearby factory which makes plastic shopping bags, helping out the owner by running errands for him,” she said.

As it turns out, Muji was not staying in the workers’ quarters but instead lived with the factory owner in his house somewhere in Meru.

She refused to say why this was the case, only that she was staying at the quarters for several nights as the owner is currently abroad in Australia.

"I do not know what to do now. I have an elderly father and a nine-year-old son back home. They rely on me as the family’s sole breadwinner,” she said.