Labor’s plans for visa overstayer detention centres branded a ‘Donald Trump twist’ on immigration

Australian Greens senator compares government’s policy to ICE as Tony Burke calls it a ‘ridiculous claim’

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.