A 100-strong Border Force team being established to remove 77,000 visa overstayers will not bring ICE-style immigration raids seen in the United States to Australia, the Home Affairs minister has assured. Source: ABC News.
Tens of thousands of visa overstayers have remained in Australia in part because they are not being detained, and so there is little incentive to leave, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke explained at a National Press Club address yesterday.
In an effort to encourage people to leave of their own accord, the government will create 250 beds where overstayers can be held for deportation, investigating the possible repurposing of buildings like the former quarantine facility in Melbourne as detention centres.
Mr Burke said when faced with the choice between detention and leaving of their own accord, most visa overstayers would leave.
“Before 2015, we had a routine process in Australia for overstayers where, when people had overstayed a visa, we would bring people in to detention centres … and within a few weeks they would organise their own flight and leave,” Mr Burke said.
“And effectively that didn’t just affect them, it had a behavioural impact where a whole lot of other people who were overstaying thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s better that I just get on a plane and leave.’
“Effectively, what we are going back to doing is simply being able to make sure that if you overstay, you will not be able to say: ‘Well there’s no consequences, as if they’re ever going to make sure that I leave.”
Despite his reassurance, the Greens were quick to claim the government’s expansion of Australia’s immigration detention network was a “reheating” of former prime minister Tony Abbott’s immigration policies.
“If the minister doesn’t want these policies to be compared to ICE, he should not behave like ICE,” Greens senator David Shoebridge said.
Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has expanded the country’s detention centre network and shifted to more aggressive tactics to detain people
The changes have raised human rights concerns, accusations of racial profiling in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and high profile cases of fatal shootings by ICE officers.
Migration Institute of Australia chief executive Peter van Vliet said resourcing Border Force to detain visa overstayers would not lead to ICE-style tactics.
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Minister says detaining visa overstayers will not lead to ICE-style raids (ABC News)
