Dutton Is Set to Go on a Deportation Rampage, Potentially Targeting Pro-Palestinians

In his time heading up the Immigration and Home Affairs portfolios, Peter Dutton excelled at deporting noncitizens from this country. Of late, the Liberal opposition leader has been waxing lyrical to the press about the 6,000-odd noncitizens he turfed out back in the day. And he’s now making clear that if elected into top office in May, he’s going to have a deportation field day.

The ultraconservative MP whose dog whistling antics are notorious has raised his desire to insert antisemitism into the Migration Act character test as a reason to deny or cancel a visa in respect of a noncitizen, which was once again flagged on Wednesday, a day after the opposition leader revealed his unbridled desire to have the law changed so that the minister can directly turf dual citizens out.

The ongoing deportation drive that then immigration minister Scott Morrison commenced in 2014, has targeted noncitizens. However, with a federal election looming, and Dutton making all sorts of hard-right threats, it now seems that those who’ve obtained a citizenship might find this no longer confers the ability to remain in this country indefinitely under certain circumstances.

The extreme nature of the reforms the US Trump administration have been progressing over its first weeks in office have obviously inspired some of the overly repressive policies the Liberal leader is now tossing about, and the extralegal detainment and attempt to deport US green card holder Mahmoud Khalil over his pro-Palestinian activism is straight out of Dutton’s future playbook.

And while Coalition MPs have been busily hosing down their leader’s suggestion to reform the law to allow ministers to deport dual nationals, especially as it would require a referendum to progress the necessary constitutional change, there is no reason to doubt that when it comes to reinvigorating the deportation drive, Dutton is serious, even if some of his thought bubbles don’t stand up to scrutiny.

A dangerous prospect

“My argument is that if you betray your allegiance to our country in that way, you should expect to lose your citizenship,” Dutton told Sunrise on Tuesday, in regard to ministers having the ability to cancel the citizenship of dual nationals if they’ve committed a serious criminal offence. “We would never grant somebody citizenship if we knew that they were going to undertake a terrorist act.”

“I think there are a lot of Australians at the moment who are worried about the rise of antisemitism and what we’ve seen in our country, and elsewhere, which just doesn’t reflect the values that we’ve fought for over many generations,” the Liberal leader added, even though the recent NSW antisemitic crimewave was revealed to be an elaborate hoax last week.

Morrison oversaw the passing of a major overhaul of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) in late 2014, which tightened the section 501 character test, so that noncitizens could be deported when they’ve received multiple prison sentences adding up to at least 12 months, which had lead to the mass deportation of noncitizens, with the greatest cohort turfed being New Zealand-born residents.

Dutton took over the reins of Immigration following Morrison, and by 2021, over 6,000 noncitizens had been deported due to the heightened laws and often in respect of multiple minor crimes, including traffic violations, and 2,300 of these deportees were sent across the ditch to New Zealand.

Yet, if voted into top office, Dutton will already possess more power to deport people, specifically dual citizens, than he ever did in the past, as the Albanese government enacted a citizenship repudiation law in 2023 that allows the minister to have a court consider cancelling a dual national’s citizenship in response to a long list of serious crimes, including terrorism, treason and espionage.

“What we’re proposing here is a discussion about whether we’ve got adequate laws, whether the Constitution is restrictive, and ultimately, what I want to do is keep our country safe and keep communities safe,” the Liberal leader further put to the press on Tuesday.

Mahmoud Khalil: a political prisoner

Despite his denying it, Dutton has been getting all riled up about the rights-extinguishing reforms that US president Donald Trump has been progressing of late. Although when the Liberal leader does raise his past deportation record to refute any suggestion that he needs Trump’s encouragement, credit where credit is due, Dutton has never been shy about making utterly inhumane decisions.

And the Trump administration has reminded again this month that it is certainly cut from that same cloth, when Homeland Security detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil on 8 March and threatened to deport him, not in relation to any criminal offence that he’s committed, but as he posed a security threat, which is thought to be linked to his pro-Palestine activism.

Khalil was one of the chief negotiators to act on behalf of the students staging the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University, when dealing with the institution’s management. The Trump administration has attempted to revoke his green card, or permanent resident status, and the matter is now before the courts, with the Syrian-born man remaining in detention as this plays out.

With the persecution of Khalil not only are the first glimpses of a witch hunt against pro-Palestinian activists present, but a precedent may possibly be set that would see the potential for green card holders to be thrown out of the country for the crime of speaking out on matters in a manner that the US government deems problematic.

Deporting those opposing genocide

But when it comes to Dutton, he’s old hat at turfing those with a permanent resident status out of the country over minor crimes, and he’s now wanting to revoke actual citizenships, which appears to even trump the current White House tactics. And as it is, Dutton, and every Australian immigration minister since him, has had the power to turf out noncitizens even if they don’t commit a crime.

Under the Morrison amendments, not only have more noncitizens been deported under the character test in section 501 of the Migration Act, but additional noncitizens have been deported under the terms of section 116 of the Act, which permits deportation over posing a risk to the “health, safety or good order of the Australian community or a segment of the… community”.

After Coalition MPs were told to play down Dutton’s suggestion that a referendum be held to reform the Constitution, so that the executive would be enabled to directly cancel the visas of noncitizens, rather than it remain at judicial discretion, the Coalition’s immigration spokesperson Dan Tehan raised Dutton’s proposal to add antisemitism to the migration character test again on Wednesday.

Dutton first suggested that he’d be making the holding of antisemitic beliefs or the carrying out of antisemitic acts a specific category of reason within the migration character test scheme that could see a noncitizen either denied a visa or have their visa cancelled.

The Liberal leader first raised this in response to a question put to him at the Sky News Antisemitism Summit in February. And despite the entire antisemitic crimewave that the summit was predicated upon, having since been announced a “criminal con job”, Tehan is continuing to raise the prospect of deportations over antisemitic behaviour.

One theme flowing through the summit was that antisemitic conduct not only captured recent graffiti and firebombing attacks, but at times, such behaviour also appeared to entail participation in pro-Palestinian protest activity, and this was especially clear with the suggested addition of antisemitism in the Migration Act being made to capture behaviour retrospectively to October 2023.

And as the coming federal election will soon be upon us, the fear is not only that Dutton will embark on a noncitizen and dual citizen deportation drive if elected to PM, but it’s further, whether the Coalition if in office after May, might then unleash a deportation crackdown on noncitizens who prominently participated in the actions of the pro-Palestinian movement over the past 18 months.