Nineteen of 23 migrant workers from West Bengal’s Murshidabad, who were detained in Chhattisgarh earlier this month over suspicions that they were undocumented Bangladeshi citizens have been released on Friday, reported The Hindu.

The workers, from Samserganj and Sahabad in Murshidabad, were detained on September 4 from their homes in Chunchiapara-Ganesh Nagar under the Sirgiti police station area in Bilaspur district.

Police had alleged that the men were called several times to produce their documents but did not appear, according to The Hindu.

Their families, however, said the men were taken into custody late at night despite having documents including voter identity cards, Aadhaar cards and PAN cards.

Bilaspur Senior Superintendent of Police Rajnesh Singh said 19 of the workers were released after authorities verified their names against voter lists, local administration records, family details and permanent residence documents, reported The New Indian Express.

“Further steps regarding the remaining four will depend on the reports we receive,” Singh was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Police claimed that the names of the detained men had been removed from voter lists during the special intensive revision exercise in West Bengal.

Following the detention of the 23 workers, the Chhattisgarh unit of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties alleged that the men had been detained without being served show-cause notices.

The organisation also alleged that the workers were not given sufficient time to establish the validity of their documents.

In May 2025, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs directed states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of people suspected of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

The directive came amid a wider crackdown in several Indian states following the April 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir. Police in several states, most of them governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, have since detained Bengali-speaking people, many of them Muslims, and asked them to establish their Indian citizenship, Scroll reported.

Several people have subsequently been pushed into Bangladesh after allegedly failing to establish that they were Indian citizens.

In some instances, people who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh later returned to India after authorities established that they were Indian citizens, according to Scroll.