Australia's New Visa Overstayer Detention Plan Won't Lead to ICE-Style Raids: Minister

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has assured that a new 100-strong Border Force team established to remove 77,000 visa overstayers will not lead to ICE-style immigration raids in Australia. The team will create 250 beds for overstayers to be held for deportation and investigate repurposing buildings like the former quarantine facility in Melbourne as detention centres.

"Before 2015, we had a routine process in Australia for overstayers where, when people had overstayed a visa, we would bring people in to detention centres … and within a few weeks they would organise their own flight and leave," Mr Burke said.

"And effectively that didn't just affect them, it had a behavioural impact where a whole lot of other people who were overstaying thought, 'Yeah, yeah, it's better that I just get on a plane and leave.'"

The Greens have claimed the government's expansion of Australia's immigration detention network is a "reheating" of former prime minister Tony Abbott's immigration policies. Labor's new immigration jails will be run by the same US private prison multinational that is already operating in Australia, Greens senator David Shoebridge said.

"If the minister doesn't want these policies to be compared to ICE, he should not behave like ICE," he said.

Migration Institute of Australia chief executive Peter van Vliet said resourcing Border Force to detain visa overstayers would not lead to ICE-style tactics.

"I think that's a complete overstatement of what's been planned," Mr van Vliet said.

"We had this arrangement in place before 2015. It was a fairly soft approach … it was fairly carefully targeted, it was uncontroversial."

"It's just something that has basically stopped."

According to the most recent Home Affairs migration trends report, there were 6,646 departures in the 2024-25 financial year, with about half being voluntary returns and half being removals after detention.

Former Immigration Department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi said he doubted the full cohort of 77,000 overstayers could be removed based on today's announcements, though he expected it could help to remove or cause the departure of another 5,000 to 10,000 people a year.

"To return to the policy that existed before 2015 is a good thing," Mr Rizvi said.

"They were a very different operation to what we see in the United States," he said, describing the pre-2015 operations.

In a statement, the Human Rights Law Centre said the changes would punish workers vulnerable to exploitation because they would make undocumented workers less likely to speak up.

"Undocumented migrants who have been exploited at work should be protected to take action against their employers. Instead of needlessly expanding the punitive immigration detention network, the Albanese government should invest in protections for migrant workers to ensure that all workers have safety and dignity at work," legal director Sanmati Verma said.