Tony Burke defends Labor plan to detain visa overstayers in Australia amid Donald Trump ICE comparisons
A crackdown on unlawful non-residents as part of a broader migration overhaul will not resemble US-style immigration enforcement, the government says.
A plan to round up and detain migrants who over-stay their visas is not borrowing from US President Donald Trump’s playbook, Labor insists.
Humanitarian groups have bristled at the scheme announced by Immigration Minister Tony Burke on Thursday, aimed at drawing down the roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens in Australia.
More of those people will now be placed in detention for a matter of weeks, Mr Burke said, encouraging them and others to leave of their own accord.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.The plan is a reversion to pre-2015 settings, according to the minister, before a shake-up largely limited migration detention to criminals, not visa over-stayers.
“This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries,” Mr Burke told Canberra’s National Press Club, making a cloaked reference to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)‘s rough and much-publicised raids, detentions and deportations.
Whether children would be detained or separated from family members was not outlined by Mr Burke.
AAP has contacted his office for comment.
Australia’s pre-2015 migration detention regime placed kids in a “horrific pipeline,” former head of the Australian Human Rights Commission Gillian Triggs told AAP.
“There were 1100 children held in detention without education, for more than a year and longer for some, but detained indefinitely,” Dr Triggs said, referencing a 2014 report published by the commission.
“Most of those children were severely mentally and physically ill ... the damage that was done to children and families is well documented, and probably unique globally.”
The report helped spur significant reductions in number of migrant children detained in Australia.
In the intervening decade, indefinite detention without reasonable prospect of being returned to one’s own country has been outlawed by a landmark 2023 High Court decision, but it’s unclear how that might apply to this change.
Labor’s plan would also involve hiring 100 new compliance officers and freeing up 250 beds, as well as potentially repurposing a 100-bed quarantine facility near Melbourne Airport used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Filling all that new capacity would almost double Australia’s migrant detention population of 1100, according to figures from the Refugee Council of Australia.
Those figures drew inevitable comparisons to shocking ICE-driven crackdowns in the United States, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre chief executive Kon Karapanagiotidis said.
“No matter who is in power, rounding people up, locking people up in detention centres is brutal,” he said.
“Why would you be building that sort of capacity if you weren’t also considering detaining whole families?”
Mr Burke described the proposed new system as “modest”.
“When people overstay, they come into detention, you give them a bridging visa first, at the end of the bridging visa, they come into detention and then they leave,” he told the ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday.
“Overstayers at the moment have just had an attitude of ‘well, what are you going to do?’ ... if you don’t have a visa in Australia, then you should leave.”
