Prostitution arrests are racist. They have always been racist.

(Juno Mac and Molly Smith)

Across Australia, there has rightly been widespread media coverage of the ICE raids occurring in the United States. Bolstered by increased funding and powers granted by the Trump administration, the twenty-two-year-old Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency has been arresting thousands of people across the country in racially-motivated strikes, regardless of citizenship or criminal history. In response, anti-fascist demonstrations have also flared up across the country, most notably in California. The famous video of an Australian journalist being hit by a rubber bullet whilst covering the protests in Los Angeles shook up much of our notoriously pro-police media, with many, including the prime minister, shaking their heads and gasping with relief that such things could never happen here.

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, very similar things are happening. The Australian Border Force, which just recently celebrated only its tenth anniversary, has been targeting workplaces across the city, cancelling Visas on the spot and placing vulnerable people, without charge, into mandatory detention. Most cases have ended in deportation. All of this has been done in the name of breaking up criminal networks, preventing the exploitation of migrant labour, and even going so far as to claim to benefit the victims of these raids. It’s time we took a closer look, then, at Operation Inglenook.

While the ineffective, cruel, and outright illegal nature of our nation’s bipartisan immigration laws have been widely-reported on for over a decade, the practices of the ABF are much less publicised for various reasons, despite their obvious similarities with those of ICE. Operation Inglenook almost entirely targets racial minorities, particularly workers from East and Southeast Asia. More than half of the operation’s victims have come from Japan (52 per cent), with China, Taiwan and Thailand combined making up another quarter. Additionally, 93 per cent of victims are women, nearly half of whom are under thirty years old. But the main reason there has been so little reporting about these raids is that these victims are sex workers, many are trans women, and their workplaces are brothels and massage parlours.

Sex work was officially decriminalised in Victoria by the Sex Work Decriminalisation Act 2022. This was an initiative designed to ensure that sex service businesses would be treated like other businesses in the state and that sex workers would enjoy the same protections as other workers. However, the unveiling of the legislation also made specific mention of sex trafficking, stating explicitly that “offences relating to sex trafficking, children, coercion and other criminal activity continue to apply”.

Operation Inglenook is ostensibly an initiative designed to prevent sex trafficking, and began as a reactive initiative following an investigation by journalist Nick McKenzie. This found that tens of thousand of people live in Australia, that this number included exploited foreign workers, and that our overly generous and straightforward immigration system was to blame. The doco even mentioned so-called “visa farms” granting humanitarian visas to exploited workers.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil immediately responded by blaming her predecessor, Peter Dutton, claiming that the system was broken and the level of exploitation was causing lengthy queues for legitimate applicants. Both major parties supported measures to “combat visa fraud” and crack down on these criminal networks.

Worker exploitation is very, very real in the sex industry, as in any industry — especially those that are disproportionately more likely to employ a marginalised workforce. But the measures, such as more complex immigration tests, suggested by McKenzie and O’Neil, are likely to make the problem worse, not better. As Juno Mac and Molly Smith write in the book Revolting Prostitutes:

You don’t stop people wanting or needing to migrate by making it illegal for them to do so, you just make it more dangerous and difficult, and leave them more vulnerable to exploitation. Punitive laws may dissuade some from making the journey, but they guarantee that everyone who does travel is doing so in the worst possible conditions.

In other words, a more complex system is a more inaccessible system, and thus makes it much more likely for young women with poor English skills to end up depending on assistance from harmful actors. Mac and Smith also take issue with the term “sex trafficking” itself, writing:

Uncritical use of the term trafficking is doing the ideological work required for these contradictions to ‘make sense’; it hides how anti-migrant policies produce the harm that we call trafficking, enabling anti-migrant politicians to posture as anti-trafficking heroes even as they enact their anti-migrant policies.

Just like how the criminalisation and stigmatisation of sex work resulted in sex workers being forced to operate in unhealthy and dangerous conditions, allowing whorephobia to pose as “rescuing women”, anti-trafficking campaigns are resulting in hyper-policed borders with inaccessible immigration procedures that force desperate migrants into the situations that they need to be saved from. We might as well start a house fire so we can rescue the family inside, while trying to put it out by drowning it in petrol.

Make no mistake: these are raids on workplaces, and the de jure decriminalisation earlier this decade did very little to make them safer or less-policed. The perception that brothels disproportionately employ and exploit migrant labour more than other businesses is also false. A report from the Migrant Worker Taskforce in 2019 found that as many as half of Australia’s 880000 workers may be underpaid. Investigations into farms in Queensland and New South Wales found extreme levels of abusive workplace practices, including some workers being paid as little as $9 an hour. As for the convenience store chain 7/11, a Four Corners investigation ten years ago found that some stores were paying their workers as little as 47 cents an hour. The recent scandals into the childcare industry have also unveiled horrific exploitation of migrant labour to fill employment gaps in the system. It’s not an industry-specific problem. It’s a societal problem that Operation Inglenook has no role in solving.

We still live in an age where migrant sex workers are portrayed as gullible and weak damsels in distress, rather than struggling, disadvantaged women just playing the cards they have. Especially when it comes to migrant trans women, the sex industry is the only one that offers decent pay and offer a strong community. Various studies across the world indicate that sex work has 25 to 75 per cent participation rate amongst trans women. Despite all these reports on the gross exploitation of sex trafficking, other reports conducted around the same time indicated that sex work is far higher-paying than equivalent jobs in hospitality, and undoubtedly a far cry from the $9 an hour. Where are all the raids on farms in the Lockyer Valley?

The idea that sex work is an inherently degrading profession that women need to be “freed” from by the state is an aspect of a colonial and patriarchal culture Australia is still unwilling to shake. It is beyond ironic that Operation Inglenook is conducted in the name of “protecting” these women from the metaphorical shackles of sex trafficking, but ends up placing them in the very real confinement of mandatory detention. All the operation has been doing is attacking and intimidating vulnerable migrants, on shift, at what are ostensibly legal workplaces, cancelling visas, confining them without trial, and ultimately deporting them. Our own ICE raids, with a pseudo-feminist glaze.

A campaign led by grassroots sex worker advocates at the Asian Migrant Sex Worker Advisory Group, and assisted by Pride in Protest and Scarlet Alliance, led to the release of three trans detainees from Villawood Detention Centre. Bee, the third trans woman to be released, stated that the community advocacy directly assisted in her speedy release from detention and that she cried “tears of joy”. However, others were not so fortunate.

In March this year, a trans woman named Sonya was held in a male compound in Villawood Detention Centre prior to her deportation back to the Philippines. She described being sexually assaulted by police, her phone being confiscated, being denied access to her oestrogen, and the ABF even looking through her intimate photographs as they demanded a cancellation of her Visa. Despite intending to visit Australia for a holiday, arriving on a tourist Visa, and even offering to buy her own plane ticket back home, her history in the sex industry in the Philippines as well as her status as a trans woman was used as justification for her detention in the male compound at Villawood.

Sonya’s story follows many other similar stories of trans women in Villawood Detention Centre, going back years. A Southeast Asian trans woman described being denied medical care, including access to her hormones, for eight weeks, and being placed under constant supervision of male guards. More than failing to protect women, Operation Inglenook actively harms them, abuses them, and is used to violate their human rights. This operation is continuing to the present day, and some report that it may be intensifying.

To quote Vixen and Scarlet Alliance in April,

Armed officers entered sex work premises without interpreters, including service rooms while workers were actively engaged in their work. In some cases, they returned to the same premises twice within a single week. Workers were subjected to invasive Visa checks and had their personal documents recorded, leading many to stop working or change workplaces entirely due to fear or repercussions.

It’s a sign of progress that these flagrant assaults on sex workers are being discussed and condemned at all. However, this also needs to be translated into community pressure, action and a whole-hearted desire to see the end of the operation. Racially-motivated raids, trans women being placed under male confinement without trial, and police-sanctioned sexual abuse are not exclusive to foreign countries or the Trump administration. They are happening here, under Labor governments, with nobody coming to stop it.