Deportations are surging worldwide; how did this crisis become normalised?

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 A$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% 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. 

Criminalising movement

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.

Despite having served their sentences, in addition to protracted periods in immigration detention, a media frenzy framed these people as a major threat to the community. The Labour government then legislated to deport them, in addition to thousands of others on precarious visas, to a third country.

Deportations have also been a central facet of US immigration enforcement for many years.

Former President Barack Obama was branded “Deporter in Chief” for achieving a record three million deportations while in office.

While Obama focused on “felons not families”, Trump has equated migration itself with crime and insecurity. His administration has cast a much wider net, rounding up those with and without criminal convictions, including citizens.

Detentions and deportations have also been used to suppress political dissent on issues, such as the genocide in Gaza.

To expedite his pledge to deport one million people in his first year, the Trump administration hastily set up detention centres in former prisons and military bases, including at Guantánamo Bay.

Reports suggest the government has also approached 58 third countries to accept deported non-nationals. Countries that have agreed, or already received people, are shown in the map below.

In many cases, people are then re-detained on arrival in hotels, prisons and camps, with some subject to further deportation.

 

Rising authoritarianism

These recent developments reveal an explicit authoritarianism in which deportations are achieved through the elimination of procedural fairness. Reducing notice periods, the ability to appeal decisions, and access to legal counsel allows for rushed and opaque procedures.

In June, eight people were deported from the US to South Sudan without the chance to contest their removal. After a failed court intervention, the three liberal US Supreme Court justices stated:

In the UK, the Labour party expanded the “Deport Now Appeal Later” scheme in August, extending the countries to which people can be deported without appeal rights from eight to 23.

And this month in Australia, the Migration Act was amended to expunge the rules of natural justice for people scheduled for deportation.

Across all three countries, the rapid expansion of detention and deportation practices terrorise those targeted, leaving whole communities living in fear. Australian human rights lawyer Alison Battisson described deportation as “a creeping death to the individuals and their families”.

These policies have also legitimised and emboldened far-right, neo-Nazi groups, who have taken to the streets in both the UK and Australia in recent weeks calling for an end to migration. In both countries, the effects of decades of neoliberal policies, such as a lack of affordable housing, jobs, and health care, are redefined as a problem of migration.

How communities are responding

Communities are now organising and making the case for a different sort of politics.

In Los Angeles, for example, grassroots organisations mobilised earlier this year to counter escalating raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Networks also began providing information and support to those targeted by ICE arrests. In July, Detention Watch Network relaunched the Communities Not Cages coalition of grassroots campaigns against detention.

In the UK, far-right rallies at asylum hotels have been met by counter demonstrations, with people insisting on a politics of welcome and unity.

But the challenge remains how to turn local and national opposition into a coalition capable of confronting this rise in authoritarian politics of exclusion and expulsion.