A man in his sixties, barefoot, wearing a t-shirt, is pinned to the floor of his lounge by four armed men. Another four mill around. His wife looks on, wordless and bewildered. There is commotion — mostly the officers bellowing at the man to calm down as he flails. Eventually, he is pulled up by the arms and shuffled out the door. The entire scene is filmed by his teenage son.

As we write, a version of this scene is playing out in a workplace or suburban street, as the Australian Border Force snatches people from their families in the community and exiles them to Nauru — a former colony in the Pacific — on thirty-year visas they never applied for.

As we watch Immigration and Customs Enforcement lay siege to communities in Minnesota — detaining and disappearing neighbours, parents and children while terrorising their allies — we should remember that our own legal system allows immigration authorities to do precisely the same thing.

The only distinction is one of scale. Or, perhaps, of time.

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How did we get to this dystopian point?

The answer is a long one. According to one view, it all started in the late 1800s, with the establishment of reserves as a form of administrative detainment of First Nations people on their own lands, providing a blueprint for the detention of migrants and refugees to follow.

Others might trace it to 1992, when a change to a single word in the Migration Act — from “may” to “must” — rendered the detention of any person without a visa mandatory.

But the shortest version of the story starts from 2014, when the Coalition introduced mandatory visa cancellation for anyone serving more than twelve months in jail. This meant that, no matter how long someone had lived in Australia, or even if there was no other country to deport them to, their visa would automatically be cancelled, and it would be up to them to try and get it back. Critically, it meant that people were pipelined from prison to immigration detention at the end of their sentence, where they would remain while trying to have their visa reinstated.

The most insidious effect of the mandatory cancellation regime was to normalise the double punishment of people on visas — the idea that migrants and refuges who served jail time forfeited the right to return to the community, and should instead face a second, potentially indefinite form of punishment at the end of their sentence.

Fast forward now to 2023. The supercharged visa cancellation regime meant people were spending, on average 800 days, or two years, in immigration detention. People transferred from prison after the cancellation of their visa were spending double or triple the length of their sentence in detention. Data from that year indicated that two people had been in detention for over sixteen years.

Then, in November 2023, the High Court ruled that indefinite immigration detention was unconstitutional. Some 354 people were subsequently released into the community after years of being locked up illegally. Every one of those people has a deep tie to this place — because they have been here most of their lives, have family here or because it is the only safe place they have ever known.

Within days of the High Court’s decision, the government adapted the pre-existing Bridging “R” visa framework to subject people released from detention to conditions lifted over from its regime for “high-risk terrorist offenders” — including ankle bracelets, curfews, geographic exclusions and regular reporting. Breach of those conditions was made an offence, punishable with a mandatory minimum twelve months’ imprisonment. Not a thought was given to the obvious difficulties people would face in adapting to life after years — sometimes decades — in prison and then detention. Breach charges piled up in criminal courts for trivial instances of noncompliance, like missing a nightly curfew or failing to properly charge an electronic monitor. Many people were quickly cycled back into the criminal legal system.

Then, in November 2024, the High Court ruled that electronic monitoring and curfews were unconstitutional — an “extra-judicial form of collective punishment”. The next day, the conditions were reintroduced, based on a slightly modified legal test that is now subject to yet another High Court challenge.  

Amidst all of this, the government struck upon the ultimate solution for people it could neither detain, nor deport to their own country. In early 2025, it announced an initial deal with Nauru to receive three people on thirty-year visas, which it then extended in late 2025 to cover an undisclosed number of individuals. A suite of amendments to the Migration Act was passed to trigger the re-detention of people who had been granted a Nauruan visa, remove any requirement to give notice before such a grant, and to criminalise noncompliance with removal processes.

In effect, this new regime means that an unlimited number of people can be issued with thirty-year visas to enter Nauru, snatched from their families and lives in the community and taken back into immigration detention, pending their final removal.

Beyond the known cost, there is almost no available information about the Nauru deal — how many people are subject to it, whether people will ever be able to leave the island (roughly the size of Tullamarine airport) once they arrive, or whether they will ever see family in Australia again.

To date, five people have already been taken to Nauru, with around thirty more re-detained pending their removal.

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It is obvious that we cannot stand by while people are taken from their homes, their lives and families and banished to a distant country with which they have no connection.

But for us, the significance of this moment runs deeper.

The selective punishment of one group of migrants or refugees is not an incidental feature of our migration regime: it is its central organising principle. What the government can do to one group serves as a disciplinary tale to everyone holding a visa, about their proper place in the social order. It’s designed to keep people’s heads down, keep them silent at work and on the streets. In other words, it is designed to up the stakes in the constant dialectic between “good” and “bad” migrants. We owe an obligation of solidarity to our friends, family, co-workers and neighbours on visas to push back. And we should remember that the same minister overseeing these deportations has recently been handed the power to outlaw organisations as “prohibited hate groups”, exposing their members to seven years’ imprisonment. There is a throughline that connects our punitive migration regime with the expanding criminalisation of resistance to genocide and colonial violence.

On 23 January, a general strike in Minnesota called tens of thousands of people onto the streets in defence of their communities. Organisers have been clear-eyed about what they are fighting: the systematic underinvestment in housing, education and welfare, and the overinvestment in prisons, police and deportation. It is time for us to draw the same lines, with clarity and purpose, so that our final line of defence is not a teenager and his mobile phone.

Image: Waves crash against the wall at the end of Nauru International Airprot’s runway (Wikimedia Commons)