Plan revives pre-2015 detention approach for 77,000 overstayers
Australia’s federal government announced plans Thursday to reopen immigration detention centres for people whose visas have lapsed, hiring 100 new compliance officers and freeing 250 additional beds. Home Affairs Minister Burke unveiled the policy at the National Press Club, with a 100-bed quarantine facility in Victoria potentially to be repurposed under the plan.
Burke said the policy targets roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens in Australia and would place most of them in detention “a matter of weeks” before they are encouraged to leave voluntarily. The plan supports Labor’s stated goal of reducing net overseas migration from 292,100 to a budgeted 245,000 in 2026-27 and 225,000 each year thereafter.
Greens immigration spokesperson David Shoebridge compared the policy to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, calling it “a 2026 Donald Trump twist.”
“This is where Labor has sunk to, reheating Tony Abbott’s immigration attacks, with a 2026 Donald Trump twist,” Shoebridge said. “Labor’s new immigration jails will be run by the same exploitative US private prison multinational that is already abusing people’s rights in immigration detention here. If the Minister doesn’t want these policies to be compared to ICE, he should not behave like ICE.”
Burke rejected the comparison.
“This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries,” Burke said at the National Press Club. “The Green Party knows it isn’t true,” he told The Guardian. “We are simply going back to what Australia had done for decades until mandatory cancellation started, which was to have around 250 beds used when someone no longer had a visa but was refusing to leave.”
Burke described the new approach as a return to a “routine process” that had existed until mandatory visa cancellation for criminal offenders was introduced in 2014 under former immigration minister Peter Dutton. That shift rapidly filled detention centres and prompted the department to pivot toward short-term bridging visas for low-risk overstayers.
It remained unclear how the 2023 High Court decision that outlawed indefinite detention without a reasonable prospect of being returned to one’s home country would apply to the new approach.
The plan enlarges the detention footprint operated by Management and Training Corporation, a US private prison company that won a $2.3bn contract in 2025 through its Australian subsidiary Secure Journeys. The contract was awarded despite serious concerns about MTC’s track record, according to the Guardian. MTC is one of a handful of operators running Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in the United States.
Kon Karapanagiotidis, chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said Minister Burke “went to great lengths to reassure Australians this would not look like Donald Trump’s immigration raids” but that the plan would “double Australia’s immigration detention regime” and “the right to seek asylum and the right to work while seeking safety remain in danger.”
“We will not stand by while migrants and refugees are used as political punching bags,” Karapanagiotidis said.
Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, downplayed the comparisons. He said that prior to 2015, Australian compliance officers wore “shirts and a tie,” not military gear, and were unarmed.
“They operated completely differently,” Rizvi said. “They did not enter any premises of any employer without the permission of the employer or a warrant.”
Rizvi said one of the “biggest functions” of the compliance team had been educating employers about how to check the working rights of foreign employees, which he said “all appears to have stopped.”
“Given that this cohort is at record levels and grows by around 1,000 per month, what should the government do about a cohort with no remaining right to be in Australia, noting that this cohort will be highly vulnerable to exploitation and live in the shadows of society?” Rizvi said.
Dr. Gillian Triggs, former head of the Australian Human Rights Commission, told the Australian Associated Press that Australia’s pre-2015 detention regime had placed children in “a horrific pipeline,” with hundreds held in detention without education, most of whom were “severely mentally and physically ill.”
Sanmati Verma, legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, said the federal government should invest in protections for undocumented migrants who had been exploited in the workplace “rather than needlessly expanding the punitive immigration detention network.”
“Rounding up undocumented migrants and locking them in detention is a profoundly anti-worker proposal that undermines the Albanese Government’s commitment to stamping out modern slavery,” she said.