On August 7, the court ordered the placement in public custody of two citizens of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh and imposed a ban on their entering the Republic of Moldova for five years. The two had been caught in the act by border police, in the border area of the Ungheni district, during an attempted illegal crossing of the state border — the General Inspectorate for Migration (IGM) announces, at whose request the court decided the measure.
According to the IGM, the detention took place as part of an operation to counter an organized criminal group, made up of citizens of several states — including the Republic of Moldova — suspected of organizing illegal crossings of the state border. The people involved in the network benefit from the presumption of innocence until a possible final court ruling.
The second case at Ungheni’s border in six weeks
This is not the first episode of its kind on Ungheni’s bank of the Prut. At the end of June, also in the Ungheni district — in the area of the village of Buzduganii de Jos — border police stopped a group of seven citizens of Bangladesh who were to be taken illegally across the Prut, into Romania, and from there onward, into the European Union. In that case, four Moldovan citizens were detained, suspected of recruiting and transporting the migrants for a crossing by inflatable boat, at around 1,000 euros per person; the investigation was coordinated by the Ungheni Prosecutor’s Office, together with the Border Police and the Anti-Terrorist Center of the Information and Security Service.
The public statements do not say whether the two cases have any connection to each other. What they do show, together, is that Ungheni’s border — one of the points where the Republic of Moldova borders the European Union — remains a route that illegal-crossing networks try constantly.
Illegal crossing and illegal residence: in law, two different things
A clarification is warranted here, because the wordings blur easily. In the same period, in a weekend roundup published on Monday, the General Inspectorate of Carabinieri reported a different aspect: the Mobile Intervention Company at Ungheni, together with the Border Police, allegedly identified two citizens of Bangladesh, aged 36 and 38, for breaching the residence regime. The statements do not say whether it is the same people or a parallel case — but “illegal border crossing” and “breach of the residence regime” describe, in law, two very different situations.
Illegal crossing of the state border is a crime — the Criminal Code provides for it, at article 362 —, while organizing illegal migration, that is, the work of smuggling networks, is punished separately, under article 362¹. This is where the prosecution and the criminal court come in, and the stakes are correspondingly high.
Breaching the residence regime is, as a rule, something else: an administrative offence. The Contravention Code, at article 333, describes it as the situation in which a foreigner does not leave the country when the term for which they were allowed to stay expires — an “overstay” — and penalizes it with a fine of 20 to 50 conventional units, that is, between 400 and 1,000 lei. It is an administrative violation, not a criminal act, and as a rule such a case is closed with a fine and the obligation to leave.
What comes next for the two
The measures taken on August 7 — public custody and the entry ban — are administrative instruments from the Law on the regime of foreigners. Public custody means that the two are held in a specialized center until they can be removed from the country’s territory. The ban closes their access to the Republic of Moldova for the period set by the court, in this case five years. For a foreigner whose residence becomes illegal, the law usually provides for a return decision — the obligation to leave the country within a set term —, and if the person does not leave voluntarily, removal under escort.
Who guards the border and who handles foreigners
Several structures work at the border, with distinct roles. The Border Police controls the crossing of the state border and records the violations in its area. The General Inspectorate for Migration is the authority that handles the status of foreigners: it establishes illegal residence, requests the measures from the court and orders the return or the entry ban. The carabinieri — present at Ungheni through the Mobile Intervention Company — ensure public order and support border control, but do not handle the residence procedure for foreigners.
How often it happens
At the national level, such findings are an administrative routine, not rare events. Data from the Inspectorate for Migration show that, year after year, around 2,300–2,800 foreigners are found in illegal residence in the Republic of Moldova — 2,312 in 2024 —, and the number of administrative offences for breaching the rules of residence and employment was 2,521 in the same year.
As for Bangladesh, the presence of its citizens in Moldova has grown visibly in the past year: for work, the number of those who arrived rose from 68 in 2024 to 317 in 2025, according to official statistics — which made Bangladesh the fourth country of origin of the foreign workers who came to the country, after Nepal, Uzbekistan and India. This does not mean that those stopped at the border were workers: the authorities described them as being in an attempted illegal crossing, that is, in transit toward the European Union, not settled in Moldova. These are two different faces of the same phenomenon — legal, labor migration, and illegal, transit migration — which both reach Ungheni, for different reasons.
What changes from 2027
The legal framework is about to change. A new law on the admission, residence and supervision of foreigners, adopted by Parliament in April and promulgated in May, will replace the current Law on the regime of foreigners starting from 1 June 2027. It introduces a single document — the “residence card” —, online submission of applications, 23 distinct residence purposes and the obligation of employers to pay foreigners at least at the level of Moldovan citizens for the same work. Until then, the rules remain those of today.
For a district set right on the border with the European Union, the difference between the two is not just a matter of vocabulary: a fine for exceeding the residence term is settled at the counter, an illegal-crossing network ends up before the court.