The federal government’s move to reopen detention centres for visa overstayers, overseen by compliance officers, has drawn comparison from the Greens and advocates to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown in the United States. The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, was careful to downplay any similarities when he announced the federal government’s immigration plan on Thursday, which includes reducing the roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens in Australia. He told the National Press Club the policy was returning to a “routine process” that existed prior to 2015, whereby overstayers were brought into detention centres if their visas lapsed prior to securing flights home. he sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries,” Burke said.
Burke said 100 new compliance officers would be hired to round up overstayers, and an additional 250 beds would be freed, as well as potentially repurposing a 100-bed quarantine facility in Victoria. He said most people would be placed in detention for a matter of weeks, and encouraged to leave of their own accord. Greens immigration spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said Labor should make visa processes and appeals faster rather than focusing on net migration figures.
MTC is one of a handful of private prison operators running ICE detention facilities. Burke told Guardian Australia Shoebridge was making a “ridiculous claim” by comparing Labor’s policy to the Trump administration’s immigration stance. Ramping up removals forms part of Labor’s plan to bring net overseas migration down from 292,100 to meet budget forecasts of 245,000 in 2026/27 and 225,000 each year thereafter.
The former head of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Dr Gillian Triggs, told AAP that Australia’s pre-2015 migration detention regime put children in a “horrific pipeline”, with hundreds held in detention without education, most of whom were “severely mentally and physically ill”. In 2023, a landmark high court decision outlawed indefinite detention without reasonable prospect of being returned to one’s own country, but it’s unclear how that might apply to this change. The CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Kon Karapanagiotidis, said the federal government had demonstrated “the right to seek asylum and the right to work while seeking safety remain in danger”.
The legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, Sanmati Verma, said the federal government should invest in protection for undocumented migrants who had been exploited at work rather than “needlessly expanding the punitive immigration detention network”.
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