On May 24, the Matia detention centre began to fill up as the Assam police launched a drive to round up alleged illegal immigrants in the state. Over the next few days, reports appeared of Bengali-origin Muslims held at the centre being taken to India’s border with Bangladesh and being forced to cross over at gunpoint.

Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the Assembly that 303 “foreigners” had been pushed into Bangladesh. But he did not disclose their identities.

Scroll filed a Right to Information query with the office of the Inspector-General of Prisons, Assam, asking for information on the number of detainees at the Matia centre, details of their cases, and when they were admitted inside. We also asked for detailed information on those who had been released, deported or “pushed” into Bangladesh since April 2025.

The Assam government’s reply to our questions was incomplete. It did not share any information about those forced to cross the border into Bangladesh. However, it gave us a list of those detained at the Matia detention centre between May 27 and July 8.

All 53 of them are Muslims.

The RTI response

Most of those rounded up in that crackdown were declared foreigners like the 51-year-old teacher from Morigaon, Khairul Islam, who was arrested and then forced out of Indian territory.

Declared foreigners are typically long-term residents with families and properties in Assam, who have failed to prove that they are Indian citizens before the state’s foreigners tribunals.

Islam was forced out even though his case, challenging the foreigners tribunal order, was pending in the Supreme Court.

Similarly, Shona Bhanu, a 59-year-old resident of Barpeta, was expelled from Indian territory. Both had told Scroll that they were first kept at the Matia camp before being taken to the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh.

However, the Assam government does not seem to have acknowledged these arrests, let alone their being expelled from India.

The Assam prisons department informed Scroll that 53 declared foreigners were arrested and admitted in the camp on May 27, 28 and 29 and July 8, all of them Muslims.

However, the RTI reply has no record of Islam and Bhanu being admitted to the camp in May.

Moreover, when Scroll put together an Assam government affidavit in the Supreme Court and the information from the RTI response, it became clear – in the last nearly 12 months, only Muslim declared foreigners have faced arrest and incarceration in Assam.

The CAA model

Foreigner tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies unique to Assam, which rule on citizenship cases. They have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory. Many of the appeals to FT orders are pending in the higher courts.

In the last five decades, Assam’s foreigners tribunals have declared 1.6 lakh people as non-citizens, of whom 69,559 are Hindus.

In recent years, several declared foreigners had been released from imprisonment after the Supreme Court and the Gauhati High Court ruled against their prolonged incarceration.

But that changed in August 2024.

The Assam government began a renewed crackdown on declared foreigners, who were arrested and sent to the Matia detention centre.

By September 2024, the number of detained declared foreigners at Matia, the largest detention centre in India, had increased by four times to 72.

However, all the newly arrested declared foreigners, who were sent to the detention centre in August, were Muslims, according to the Assam government affidavit filed before the Supreme Court on February 3 this year.

The admission list at the Matia centre, which is maintained by the camp authorities and was seen by Scroll, also showed that only Muslim declared foreigners were admitted following the crackdown.

As is evident from the RTI response from the Assam prisons headquarters, the May crackdown leading to “pushbacks” followed the same pattern.

The decision to spare Hindu declared foreigners is in line with the Assam government’s implementation of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act, which had triggered fierce protests from Assamese nationalists in 2019 .

For instance, in July 2024, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government asked the state’s border police not to forward cases of non-Muslims who had entered India illegally before 2014 to foreigners tribunals.

As Scroll had reported, this was a clear sign of the Assam government putting in place a citizenship regime that excludes Muslims.

Last month, too, the Assam Government asked district authorities and members of the foreigners tribunals to drop cases against the members of six non-Muslim communities who are granted amnesty under CAA.

While Assamese nationalists were opposed to all immigrants, whether Hindu or Muslim, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has raised the alarm against “Muslim infiltration”. “In Assam, we are fearlessly resisting the ongoing, unchecked Muslim infiltration from across the border, which has already caused an alarming demographic shift. In several districts, Hindus are now on the verge of becoming a minority in their own land.”

No Rohingyas

In May, Scroll had reported that all the Rohingya detainees had been expelled from the detention centre even though their cases were pending in the courts.

The Assam prison headquarters’ reply confirms that there are no Rohingya inmates at Matia. As of July 23, of the 110 inmates at Matia, three are “convicted foreigners”, 80 declared foreigners and 27 Chin refugees.

But on April 24 this year, there were 103 Rohingya refugees – 37 of them children – at the Matia camp, according to the lists maintained by the detention centre, which were accessed by Scroll.

The department said there is “no record available pertaining” to whether the refugees were deported or pushed across into Bangladesh.

Scroll had reported that they were expelled from the detention centre without following due process.

Sarma had announced that several inmates of the Matia detention centre in Assam, including Rohingya refugees, were “pushed back” into Bangladesh as part of a countrywide “operation” by the Indian government.

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