Edinburgh: Under President Donald Trump, the United States is expanding its efforts to detain and deport non-citizens at an alarming rate.
In recent months, the Trump administration made deals with a number of third states to receive deported non-citizens.
In Australia, the Labour government has similarly established new powers to deport non-citizens to third states. The government signed a secretive deal with Nauru in September, guaranteeing the small Micronesian island AUD 2.5 billion over the next three decades to accommodate the first cohort of deportees.
In both countries, migrants can now be banished to states to which they have no prior connection.
Last year in the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour party promised that the previous Conservative government’s plan to deport people to Rwanda was “dead and buried”. Yet, Labour removed close to 35,000 people in 2024, an increase of 25 per cent over the previous year.
Starmer has also proposed establishing “return hubs” in third countries for people with rejected asylum claims.
Meanwhile, the far-right Reform Party has put forward a “mass deportation” plan involving the use of military bases to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of people, if it wins power in the next general election.
Similar policies may soon come to Europe, too. In May, the European Commission published a proposal that would allow EU member states to deport people seeking asylum to third countries where they have no previous connection.
The deportation of populations deemed problematic is not a new practice. For centuries, states have used forms of deportation to forcibly remove people, as Australia’s own history as a British penal colony illustrates.
Today, deportations are a staple of migration governance around the world. However, the recent expansion of detention and deportations reflects an accelerated criminalisation and punishment of non-citizens, tied to a rising authoritarianism across purportedly liberal Western countries.
The expansion and outsourcing of deportation is underpinned by long histories of criminalising migration.
Over the past three decades, legal obstacles and securitised borders have increasingly forced those fleeing war, persecution and insecurity to rely on unauthorised routes to seek refuge. Governments have simultaneously reframed the act of seeking asylum from a human right to a criminal act, brandishing those on the move as “illegal” as a way of justifying onshore and offshore immigration detention.
Racialised people living in the community have also been subject to increased policing, regardless of their migration status.
In the US, UK and Australia, this criminalising language, once the preserve of the right-wing press, is now echoed by politicians across the political spectrum and enshrined in legislation.
This has accelerated what migration expert Alison Mountz has termed “the death of asylum”, and normalising deportations.
In Australia, for example, the government lowered the threshold for visa cancellations in 2014, resulting in people with minor offences being detained and scheduled for deportation.
Those who could not be returned to their home countries continued to languish in detention until a 2023 high court ruling mandated their release.