Sarlin Rining will be around 73 this year, and like others who have spent their lives working and living in Malaysia, she has done so without actually being a legal citizen of the place she calls home.

What makes Sarlin’s case so unusual is that in April 2019, after decades of fighting for citizenship, she was finally accorded an IC. Unfortunately, her joy was shortlived when she was summoned by the Lawas District National Registration Department (NRD) just four months later, and asked to surrender her hard-won document.

As with many, Sarlin’s case was not so straightforward at first...