Labor visa overstayer detention centre plan branded a ‘Donald Trump twist’ on immigration
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.
“This is not the 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.
“This is where Labor has sunk to, reheating Tony Abbott’s immigration attacks, with a 2026 Donald Trump twist,” he 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.”
In 2025, the US private prison company Management and Training Corporation won a $2.3bn contract to run onshore detention in Australia under its local subsidiary Secure Journeys, despite serious concerns about MTC’s track record. 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.
“The Green Party knows it isn’t true,” he said. “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.”
The shift occurred under then-immigration minister, Peter Dutton, who introduced mandatory visa cancellations for criminal offenders in 2014, which rapidly filled detention centres and saw the department quietly pivot to issuing short-term bridging visas for low-risk overstayers to manage voluntary departures.
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”.
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“Minister Burke went to great lengths to reassure Australians this would not look like Donald Trump’s immigration raids,” he said. “But look at what is actually being planned … This will double Australia’s immigration detention regime.
“We will not stand by while migrants and refugees are used as political punching bags.”
Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, downplayed the ICE comparisons, pointing out that up until 2015, compliance officers wore “shirts and a tie”, not military gear and were unarmed.
“They operated completely differently,” he 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 was 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?” he said.
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”.
“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.
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