Priya has two officials, one on either arm, telling her “it’s going to be fine” as her two daughters are crying in distress just metres away from her.
“My baby crying,” she tells them.
“My hand so painful,” Priya informs the officials, as they suggest she “just relax”.
Priya, her husband Nadesalingam and their Australian-born children Kopika, four-years-old, and Tharunicaa, two, are being deported.
On Friday night, The Project showed distressing footage of these scenes, as the Tamil asylum seeker family had been forcibly dragged onto a plane at Melbourne airport the night prior.
The family was loaded into seperate vans, before being taken on a private charter plane.
The vision sees Priya refuse to get on the plane, before she is dragged by officials as she howls in protest. Her kids are screaming.
“We hear about deportation and the threat asylum seekers face all the time, we are almost desensitised to it,” journalist Waleed Aly said before the footage played.
“Usually, it’s in reference to nameless faceless people, but these are those people, and this is exactly what deportation looks like.”
While the plane was en-route to Sri Lanka on Thursday night, it was forced to land in Darwin as a Federal court judge granted a last-minute temporary order to stop the Tamil family from being deported.
The two-year-old daughter had never had her claim for a protection visa assessed, and hence Federal Court Judge Mordy Bromberg extended the injunction on Friday.
The family’s legal team say only the youngest daughter is protected under the injunction and the rest of her family could be legally deported, but their lawyer Carina Ford said Australia would be condemned if the family was split up.
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The Quicky
Top Comments
A woman is upset! Quick! Let’s abandon sovereignty of our borders and laws that apply to everyone else!
So sad, callous, cold and heartless. But of course, she is an existing woman, so who cares, right? She only matters if she is 5 millimetres in length and has no brain stem.
You're a special sort of heartless, aren't you.
"What an incredibly cold, sad and heartless position" Les Grossman, about foetus' being aborted. He cares more about non sentient parasites than he does about living, breathing, feeling women, proving that he is but a troll on these boards.
Would she matter to you if she was a full term, viable baby?
Very hard to watch. Very sad.
I imagine not as hard as being in a refugee camp waiting for relocation whilst people with mertiless claims as has been determined in multiple Court hearings hog your spot here.
Watching people suffering in refugee camps is very hard to watch too. Suffering for 70 years, generation after generation born into camps and never being removed to a a safe place, yeah that's gross. But you can actually care about more than one thing at a time (well, some people can).
Don't act like you care about those refugees Les, it's clear you don't care for any. But if I'm wrong, what exactly have you done to get those people stuck in camps for generations over here? I'm all ears.
First, don’t accuse me of not caring about refugees when you stand there sticking up for abusers of our resettlement program who tie up our time, resources and places for those assessed as having a genuine need. You might want to clean up your own position before assuming to judge other people.
As I was the only one to raise the plight of genuine refugees in this thread, my thoughts are that the solution involves stabilisation of the regions in peril. We have the logistics and resources these days to be able to address almost any natural disaster by delivering aid in place or through temporary evacuation. That leaves zones of conflict. At the moment most of that slates back to the Middle East version of the Great Game being played out between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the explosion of the African population. Since 1980 Africa has grown from 12 to 18% of the global population and will reach close to 1/3 by 2100 according to the U.N. However, in that period they have barely increased their share of GDP or global power consumption, another measure of global development. That then becomes arguable as to if they are refugees or economic migrants, an issue Europe is struggling with and will continue to for some time.
In the first case the West should reassert strong and intimidating leadership against the leaders of these war making regimes. In the case of Africa, they should breed less and develop more, but that’s up to them.
There have been times where people who have applied for refugee visas have been refused and sent home and killed like they said they would be. You can look it up. It is not an exact science and sometimes the department get it wrong. The thing about this particular case is that the town they were living in want them to stay and are fighting for them to stay. They obviously have reasons for wanting this and this is why we have ministerial interventions. Because no two cases are the same.
Of course we can't take everyone. I have no problem with immigration restrictions, we don't have enough water as it is. What I do have a problem with is this weird demomisation of 'boat' people, and indefinite detention. No one seems concerned about visa overstayers and there are way more of them than boat people, 64,000 at last estimate. Also why was our governement so against sending those in offshore detention facilities to NZ when they offered? We could still keep out boat turn backs in place, we could still have rules about not being resettled here if you come by boat. But we could have gotten those people off the islands and actually contributing. It just makes no sense.