A war on immigration is the highest stage of border violence.
Declaring war on LGBTQIA+ migration, so-called Australia deploys harsh, punitive and racist border controls against queer asylum seekers and migrants, especially those who are displaced by rich, well-armed and powerful Western nations.
These nations have forced LGBTQIA+ migrants to leave their homes, jobs, communities and everything as a result of:
- the bigoted legacy left by European colonisation (e.g., Section 377 and Offences Against the Person Act under British colonial rule) and Christian churches (e.g., U.S. religious conservatives pushing for anti-homosexuality laws in Africa), or
- anti-queer changes in US and Western policies (e.g., laws banning proper gender-affirming care, legislation mandating that trans children be taken away by the state, federal agencies and government publications altering the acronym ‘LGBTI’ to ‘LGBI’).
And against these queer migrants, Western nations are expanding immigration restrictions.
‘Open the borders’: Border imperialism
In Undoing Border Imperialism, activist Harsha Walia writes that ‘border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement.’ Most oppressively, immigration restrictions are deployed against those who resort to migration as a result of the imperial violences of Western regimes.
For queers and other communities, an example of border imperialism is the funding freeze on the HIV response and the ‘health criteria’ of every visa application in Australia. Directly impacted by changes in US policy, HIV response organisations such as the Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) are experiencing a severe loss of funding. This shifting funding landscape affects those who are already most vulnerable to HIV such as queer communities, migrants, sex workers and detainees. Facing the loss of community support, even more people are forced to migrate to find medical care.
In response to the sudden loss of billions in funding for HIV prevention and treatment, Australia is NOT removing HIV from the list of conditions that may lead to a visa refusal. In Australia, the Department of Home Affairs attaches prejudice against HIV-positive people in the form of a ‘health cost threshold’ that migrants cannot exceed. Considering their treatment and engagement in community a burden on Australia, immigration officials refuse a permanent visa to someone who is HIV-positive and impacted by geopolitical shockwaves of the new administration in the US.
‘Refugees are welcome here’: Entry screening
Part of their war on LGBTQIA+ migration, the Australian Government subjects travellers to the entry screening process to identify asylum seekers, including queers.
In 2019, two gay Saudi journalists, Sultan and his partner Nassar, were detained in Australia when seeking asylum. Despite having valid visas, the gay Saudi couple were processed through entry screening and singled out from other passengers when officials suspected that they intended to apply for protection.
Found nowhere in Australia’s migration legislation, entry screening was established by the Australian Government to deter access to asylum. As a result of Australia’s asylum policies, LGBTQIA+ would-be asylum seekers are policed by immigration officials and turned back at the border.
How officials decided on vetting Sultan and Nassar is unclear, but the Australian Government operates an extensive system of visa requirements, surveillance technologies and other processes to stop asylum seekers. For example, they employ Airline Liaison Officers (ALOs) at major overseas airports to spot travellers who might claim asylum, including Saudi women suspected of fleeing male-guardianship laws, and cooperate with officials in the Asia Pacific and other countries to prevent them from reaching Australia.
Due to entry screening, Sultan and Nassar faced the threat of being sent back to Saudi Arabia once their visas were cancelled and officials decided that they were not allowed to apply for a temporary protection claim. LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers are put in a precarious position by the Australian Government on account of Australia criminalising the right to seek asylum.
‘No bad whores, just bad immigration laws’: Operation INGLENOOK
Besides processing passengers using entry screening to target queer asylum seekers, the Australian Border Force (ABF) also profiles trans women, especially Southeast Asians, at the border and exposes them to invasive searches and coercive questioning.
Founded allegedly to ‘rescue’ sex workers from ‘trafficking,’ Operation INGLENOOK is led by the ABF to disrupt migrant sex work. As a result of INGLENOOK activities, Asian migrant sex workers are refused immigration clearance or sent underground by raids on their workplaces.
Sonya, a trans Filipina sex worker, was detained at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre and deported in February, during Mardi Gras season. Because she was a trans woman from the Philippines, Sonya was stopped at the international airport. Her phone was taken and she was given no options when the ABF invasively searched her luggage and phone for intimate photos without her consent.
Sonya was unfairly targeted by the ABF based on her physical appearance and on racial grounds, due to the opinion of border officers about a mismatched gender marker on her Philippine passport. In August 2024, a Freedom of Information request revealed that INGLENOOK disproportionately targets female, 20- to 29-year-old travellers from Asia Pacific countries (Japan, China, Thailand, etc.). Regardless of any actual sex work history or intent to work in Australia, Asian transgender women are profiled as sex workers and disbelieved about their travel purposes at the border.
Because of INGLENOOK, Sonya was forced to sign a notice of visa cancellation after the ABF performed digital forensics to find deleted messages and uncovered connections to past sex work. Thanks to bad immigration laws, trans sex workers and queer migrants are detained and deported from Australia by the ABF in spite of NSW decriminalisation of sex work.
‘No Pride in Detention’: Immigration detention
Immigrants not immediately deported face the threat of indefinite immigration detention. The Australian government enforces mandatory detention for people awaiting visa outcomes and indefinite detention to hold migrants for years without visa decisions and no freedom in sight.
Transgender women held in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre are separated from both the women’s and the men’s quarters and forced to live alone in family housing, restricted from even walking around because of the families also housed there.
Inconsistent regulations to accommodate trans detainees mean they are ‘treated like experiments [with]… made-up rules,’ said Kayla, a trans woman moved across the country to Villawood last year with other trans women. The ABF keeps their policies opaque to let officers abuse detainees’ isolation from community supports.
Six officers followed four women detained together in 2024 from morning to night, invading their privacy and telling them no one would care if the women reported being intimidated. Transgender women detained by the ABF have been denied hormone replacement therapy and sexually assaulted by other detainees and guards.
What happens in detention centres is kept under tight lock and key with the federal Labor government passing legislation in November allowing ABF officers and detention centre staff to confiscate detainees’ phones, further cutting off their lines to alert those outside of their detention and treatment. Detainees kept in Nauru or Manus Island, Australia’s offshore concentration camps, face near-complete communication blackouts with even lawyers and human rights workers denied visitation.
‘We’re here, we’re queer’: The War on the War on Immigration
In Not Your Rescue Project, organisers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam write that Western regimes ‘have created millions of economic and political refugees’ and in fact ‘are the real human traffickers, forcing tens of millions of people to leave home and into unsafe migration.’ Essentially, LGBTQIA+ individuals and communities are displaced by imperialist policies, and their movement is policed by Western borders.
To oppose the war on LGBTQIA+ migration, the queer community must support queers, asylum seekers and migrants, and especially queer asylum seekers and migrants. In 2021, two undocumented immigrants from Senegal, Ibrahima Diack and Magatte N’Diaye, risked deportation to stop a gay bashing in Spain and were then ‘adopted’ by their city, and in Sydney queer activists are intervening to stop the detention and deportation of trans women in Villawood, 21 km from the University of Sydney.
A war on our migration is the last stage of border violence, Western imperialism and anti-queer, transphobic bigotry, and the LGBTQIA+ community must fight back for trans justice, refugee and migrants rights, queer liberation, prison abolition and full decriminalisation for all sex workers. On the front line of LGBTQIA+ migration, we must declare war on immigration restrictions, border controls, imperial violences, mandatory detention, forced deportation (‘refoulement’), entry screening and Operation INGLENOOK. No pride in detention, no one is illegal and permanent visas now!
Join the campaign to demand freedom, dignity and safety for trans women in detention.
