Albanese’s Looming Deportation Drive Might Bring Trump’s Nightmare Home

As Trump launches an authoritarian takeover of the US based on an antiimmigration drive, the people of this country should be concerned about the surprise unveiling of the Albanese government’s new immigration policy, because, as seen in the US, a mass deportation drive means everyone’s rights are eroded, as everyone becomes a potential target or a potential conspirator.

Albanese dumped the Migration Act 1958 (Cth) amendments on parliament on Tuesday 26 August 2025, which, now passed, have stripped up to 80,000 refugees of their rights to due process in regard to their legal status, which makes it easier to deport them, and then late on Friday, a press release was posted, announcing the home affairs minister had cut a deal to deport people Nauru.

The revealing of these antirefugee measures coincided with the mass mobilisation of mainly white Australians protesting immigration last Sunday. The protests were organised anonymously but attributed to the Freedom movement and later appropriated by neo-Nazis. Then all jurisdictions let these marches proceed, despite it being clear the National Socialist Network would be involved.

The storm of antiimmigration sentiment that locally swelled up on 31 August 2025, is also occurring in nations like the UK and Japan. These allied nations, like ours, have been under significant pressure from the Trump administration to make social reforms, whether that be institutions recognising one sex, upping military spending or toeing the line on Israel. So why would migration be any different?

With a coming war on China that would be waged in part in the north of this continent, where the US is now undertaking a soft military colonisation at an ever-increasing pace, the end goal of a deportation drive would not necessarily be to eject migrants but rather the establishing of a surveillance network to track noncitizens and to further surveil and subdue the domestic population.

The stripping of rights

When Donald Trump was elected to office for a second go at the presidency on 5 November 2024, he was warning of a crackdown on undocumented immigrants, but no one had envisaged masked goons in plain clothes jumping out of unmarked vans, sweeping people up off the street and placing them in immigration detention. This violating behaviour undermines the rights of all in a society.

Albanese’s new migration legislation is dubbed the Anti-Fairness Bill because it strips noncitizens of their right to natural justice or fair procedure in the immigration process, which means the removal of regular procedures such as notifications of pending deportation and the right to respond to a removal from the country, which permits government to ignore legitimate reasons not to deport.

The government can now notify an individual of deportation on the spot, and if they don’t cooperate, they can be imprisoned via another rights-eroding law Albanese passed late last year. The idea of being tossed in prison for refusing to comply with immediate deportation does trigger scenes of ICE agents disappearing noncitizens and even green card holders off the American streets.

These laws are said to target around 350-odd former noncitizens released from indefinite detention after the High Court deemed it illegal, however these laws could have implications for up to 80,000 noncitizens. And some advocates are warning that if the government purposefully removes a cornerstone of the justice system in respect of noncitizens, it’s a slippery slope for all to lose rights.

Meanwhile, Home Affairs notified the public late Friday afternoon, three days after the new rights eroding laws had been tabled in parliament, that the minister had been in Nauru to sign a deal with that nation’s president, which sees this country paying that nation billions of dollars to resettle these people, officially considered too dangerous to live here, on their tiny low-income island.

The arrangement with Nauru has been facilitated via a suite of antirefugee laws that were passed at the last minute late last year, which include a law permitting authorities to imprison a person who does not cooperate with their deportation, which becomes much more sinister when its coupled with the idea of Australian Border Force agents in plainclothes accosting people on the streets.

Reclaiming a fallacy

These antiimmigration rallies were in direct response to the immense outpouring of solidarity for the Palestinian cause that took place across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 3 August, as the assertion was that Israel perpetrating a genocide in Gaza is not an issue for Australia, and mobilising against it, became a timely moment to blame immigrants for cost-of-living and housing crises woes.

The major parties have been demonising the broad Palestinian movement at all levels of government since it commenced in October 2023, in response to Gaza. The majors have been dehumanising refugees for the past two decades. Labor and the Coalition, along with other more far-right politicians, have fostered a climate for the outpouring of white supremacist sentiment last weekend.

Yet, despite the ground long being laid for the unprecedented mass antiimmigration protests, the so-called continentwide March for Australia still provided a shock, so that it appeared as if out of nowhere, and the participants continued with their ongoing delusional calls to reclaim Australia or for a return to a white Australia, despite First Nations always having existed on this landmass.

This outpouring of nationalism didn’t only occur here, however. Antiimmigration protests are happening in the UK, Ireland and Japan. These nations are allied with Australia. And besides Ireland, they’re all preparing to follow the US into a major war against China, and it would be ideal to have the domestic population subdued, and not protesting or taking direct actions, to disrupt the war.

Surveilling and tracking all and sundry

The United States ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agency has been using Palantir Technologies systems since 2013. Currently, Palantir AI (article intelligence) programs are employed to mine multiple databases to “identify, track and deport suspected noncitizens”, and last month, ICE just renewed its contract with Palantir, which is rolling out new platform ImmigrationOS this month.

Chaired by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir’s AI data mining systems are being used by Israel to commit the genocide upon the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military has been using them to track down individuals and murder them. Palantir CEO Alex Carp is on the record as saying his tech company built “the digital kill chain” and his products do “kill people” on occasion.

The US is currently sending out swarms of ICE agents into American neighbours. So, its citizens are watching on as undocumented migrants are hunted down, without any sign of due process or right to privacy, via the all-pervasive eye of these AI systems, which serve not only to surveil migrants for potential deportation, but also dissenting minds, along with every single US citizen and resident.

So, considering Israel and the US are increasingly dependent upon these AI technology platforms, it comes as no surprise that Australian agencies are too utilising data mining, with local Palantir clients being the Australian Department of Defence, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), which is increasingly spying on the domestic population.

The precedent is set

In jumping down the rabbit hole about where Albanese’s mass deportation drive could potentially lead, there is no specific indication that the US is pushing Australia on immigration, and the Labor Party’s new extreme rights eroding policy could simply be the next step in a decadeslong local project to dehumanise and torture vulnerable people arriving by boat to serve as deterrence.

Yet, the US has been pressuring its allies to mimic the far-right shift of the Trump administration. These days, the talk of the need to raise military spending is all pervasive across the western world thanks to Trump, which was not the case 12 months ago. And the White House has also been pushing Australian universities to only recognise two sexes and to stop prioritising diversity in hiring.

The other key reason why such ruminations are appealing is that the US is on a full-scale militarisation drive in northern Australia, which appears to be in preparation for the coming war against China, as this continent is set to be a frontline in such a conflict, and rising civil society resistance to such developments further trigger a need to keep the domestic population at bay.

The US and the UK are soon to establish a nuclear-powered submarine presence in WA. There are 2,500 US Marines stationed in Garramilla-Darwin. US and Australian air forces are becoming increasingly interoperable. The Pentagon has unimpeded access to dozens of local military bases and areas, while Pine Gap, the most important US base outside of the States, is in the Red Centre.

Indeed, the roll out of a mass surveillance system on the pretext of an antiimmigration drive in order to establish authoritarianism domestically does have precedent in a previously liberal western democracy in the world today.