The pandemic makes borders legible in new ways. For some, the death counts and interactive maps tracking the global movement of the virus recall the monitoring of sea journeys and charting of refugee movements. For others, the act of crossing borders is made visible anew, as different sorts of bodies are ensnared at airports and surveillance points. These redraw once again the permeable lines between rights and rightlessness, the privileges and limits of citizenship. Different biopolitical permutations are playing out before our eyes from moment to moment.

If a nation is willing to detain and torture innocent men, women and children, for years on end and indeed indefinitely, all to protect its borders, it’s crucial to ask: what is the Australian border? Why is it so important, and so fragile that it needs this incredibly violent, elaborate and expensive protection?

Everyone involved in this case on the family’s side desperately hopes to see a legal victory. And right now, that’s probably the only hope. But the lawyers can’t save everyone.

Borders are not just political and economic: they are ideological. They are about creating what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls a ‘systemic cruelty [with a] dehumanising culture’ that allows a line to be drawn between people we care about and those we consider dispensable.

The Australian Border Force and Home Affairs exist in service of career pursuits for power but, more than that, they conjure an apocalyptic vision of the outside world which promotes inhumane policies.

Nagle claims that the liberal-left position on immigration reflects its elite detachment from the concerns of ordinary people: the American workers whose livelihoods are threatened by an influx of cheap labour.