The department locked up one person for a year and a half before they were released, according to a report from the Commonwealth Ombudsman.
A culture of “act first, check later” in the Department of Home Affairs led to repeat mistakes causing almost every wrongful detention in a single year, including an Australian citizen and a person who was held for a year and a half before being released.
One person was detained for a week despite receiving an invalid visa refusal letter – the same mistake that had resulted in a man being incorrectly detained in 2018 for four years. Immigration detention staff can lawfully detain a person if they “know or reasonably suspect” them to be an unlawful non-citizen. Wrongful detentions occur when the suspicion is incorrect and the person is released, according to the ombudsman. It did not analyse whether Home Affairs officers reasonably held suspicions about detained people in the first place, saying that would be too legally complex.
The median period a person was wrongfully detained was four days, while one detainee was held for a year and a half because a case officer accidentally removed the expiration date of his visa. An Australian citizen was detained after being issued a visa mistakenly and then taken into custody after it was revoked. Only then were they able to prove their citizenship.
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