A Yemeni official said Monday that thousands of Yemenis will be deported from the Kingdom in the coming days as a result of the ongoing campaign to track illegal residents and offenders in the Kingdom under the provisions of the an employment act amended a year ago.

The official was quoted on the Yemen Press website as saying that the authorities had begun to raid a number of neighborhoods which may house illegal expats in several cities in Saudi Arabia.

A Yemeni commission, which addresses the issues of the displaced ,said it had prepared a contingency plan to receive the deportees and accommodate them.

The Saudi authorities had given illegal residents a chance to correct their status but thousands of expats were unable to make use of the amnesty period and sent to prisons which became overwhelmed with a large number of detainees.

About 300,000 illegal Yemeni residents were deported from the Kingdom in the last seven months of 2013, according to reports by rights organizations.

Hadi Abdullah Saleh, director of Passport Department at Al-Thuwwal port on the Yemeni border, said the returnees were illegally residing in the Kingdom. “Thousands of Yemeni expats were arrested by Saudi authorities for various violations of the regulations laid down by the Labor Ministry,” he said.

An estimated 1.5 million Yemeni workers live and work in Saudi Arabia of which nearly 30 percent are at risk of deportation following amendments to the labor laws in the Kingdom.

Economists fear the return of thousands of workers to their homeland will escalate the burgeoning problem of unemployment and poverty in Yemen.