Australia Eyes Ripping Up $2.3b Immigration Detention Contract

CANBERRA — The Australian government has begun docking the pay of an ICE-linked private prison operator, recouping millions of dollars for its poor performance managing a $2.3 billion Australian dollar contract to run the country’s onshore immigration detention centers.

The Home Affairs Department is seeking advice from the Australian Government Solicitor (AGS) on options including tearing up Secure Journeys’ five-year contract before its December 2029 expiry. The department is also considering stripping the operator of some of its duties, according to two Home Affairs and AGS sources granted anonymity to discuss confidential internal matters.

Fires, escapes, and deaths in detention are among the litany of problems the department wants answers to. Unions are furious too: and will stop work today and Friday, over what they say are deteriorating conditions and a large pay gap between immigration detention staff and prisons officers.

The poor performance has also prompted doubts about the government’s ability to deliver its promised increase to deportations. One Home Affairs official labeled it “absolute bullshit” to suggest an increase in deportations can be achieved given the difficulties with the current contract.

Since Secure Journeys began managing onshore detention in March 2025 it has dealt with a string of incidents culminating in 12 escapes, a death at the Melbourne Immigration Detention Centre on July 10, 2026, and an alleged murder at Villawood in January 2026. The Australian Federal Police have charged several detainees for alleged assaults.

Secure Journeys is the Australian subsidiary of the Management and Training Corporation (MTC) which operates several U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities.

After Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke hauled MTC’s president to a face-to-face meeting in Sept. 2025 to express concern about poor performance, the department then began issuing fines to Secure Journeys as soon as the contract allowed after the initial transition period, according to a Home Affairs Department source. This included a penalty of between $5 and 10 million for the first month alone (Sept. 2025) levied in the last few months due delays finalizing penalties.

Home Affairs Department officials confirmed at a Senate Estimates hearing in May that the 12 escapes resulted in financial penalties charged to Secure Journeys. A fine was also considered for a Sept. 2025 fire incident in which staff suffered smoke inhalation. POLITICO understands from two Home Affairs sources financial penalties have also been applied for failure to properly document visits to detainees.

Although never an easy environment to work in, staff report the detention centers were better managed under the previous operator, Serco. United Workers Union (UWU) national president Lyndal Ryan, who represents the detention operator workers, said that conditions had “absolutely” deteriorated under the new operator and that “very significant cuts to staffing since Secure Journeys took over the contract” are to blame.

‘We’re five minutes off a significant disaster’

The UWU estimates a reduction from 1,900 to 1,000 staff after the operator change. Answers from Home Affairs to questions from Greens Senator David Shoebridge reveal that across six detention centers and one alternative place of detention, Secure Journeys maintained a median staffing level of 676 staff each day in the period July 2025 to March 2026.

The result is that one staff member is required to supervise up to 50 detainees receiving visits at a time, a practice the union says makes policing contraband such as weapons and drugs a near-impossible task. With gang-related violence common, detainees have taken to sleeping in common areas with CCTV to stay safe, such as halls, cafeterias, and classrooms.

“One staff member in a compound is obviously an unsafe practice,” Ryan said. “It’s at a critical stage, where it’s not just the workers who are saying that it’s highly problematic," she said, citing the Commonwealth Ombudsman and work health and safety regulators.

“We’re five minutes off a significant disaster. We’ve seen some terrible things already in terms of escapes, increased incidents and fires –- it’s an out of control situation.”

Julie O’Brien, the deputy Commonwealth ombudsman, said it had visited all onshore detention centers in the contract transition period, from November 2024 to October 2025. The transition was managed poorly and it impacted the overall safety and security of the immigration detention network and the day-to-day lives of people in detention,” she said.

O’Brien blamed “critically low staffing levels compared to pre-transition levels.” Although the department agreed a fix was needed, it rejected calls for a minimum increase in staff. The concerns are yet to be addressed.

“We hold really serious concerns about the safety and security of the Villawood facility [in Sydney] … We’ve observed deterioration and damage to the building … [which] leads to safety hazards. And we’ve also observed the seemingly free movement of illicit substances, with people in detention reporting substance abuse is commonplace.”

Detention unsafe for visa overstayers

In July 2026 Australia’s immigration detention centers housed 1,041 detainees, unlawful non-citizens awaiting deportation. Although the High Court ruled in November 2023 that indefinite immigration detention is unlawful, long stays are common as Australia struggles to deport those with criminal convictions or refugee protection claims. Detainees are held for an average of 458 days, with 19% in detention for more than two years.

Some 89.1% of detainees have a criminal history, a fact Burke blames on the 2015 decision of the former Coalition government to ramp up mandatory cancellation of visas for certain offenses. In 2020, an independent review warned the Australian government that immigration detention is “failing”, and “prison-hardened detainees” made onshore detention unsafe for staff and other detainees.

The Australian government is under pressure from Coalition and One Nation, the parties of the right, to cut net overseas migration. It has promised measures to deport unlawful non-citizens, including an estimated 77,000 people who have overstayed their visas.

At the National Press Club in September, while announcing the increase in deportation efforts with 100 more compliance officers and 250 more beds in detention, Burke appeared to concede the conditions in some centers are unsafe. “There are many compounds there where there is no way I would share a [visa] overstayer with that particular caseload,” he said.

Burke suggested the extra beds for those awaiting deportation will be provided in alternative places of detention, hotels such as the Park Hotel in Melbourne where tennis star Novak Djokovic was detained before his deportation in 2022 over supplying false Covid-19 vaccine information to the government, or the former quarantine facility in Melbourne.

“This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries,” he said, distancing the Labor government’s deportation policy from ICE-style raids in the U.S.

Uplift in deportations ‘is absolute bullshit’

A Home Affairs Department source told POLITICO changing service providers “would be chaos and expose the Commonwealth to huge health, safety and financial risks. The minister is talking about more community pick-ups of illegals and faster removals — you can’t do either in the short term if you’re bringing Serco back.”

“They’re not going to be able to stand that up [Melbourne quarantine] before July next year. Where will they go? Hotels. If Secure Journeys can’t even do its existing job, how can they accommodate an extra 250 in hotels … All this proposed uplift in removals is absolute bullshit.”

Critics including the UWU and Greens blame structural features of the contract for conditions in detention. “There should be and should always have been minimum staffing levels set by the client,” Ryan said. “It’s not a feature of this contract, and there in-lies the problem: despite this being a very lucrative contract, the incentive is to cut as much labor as possible to maximize profits.”

Answers by the department to questions on notice at Senate estimates confirm that minimum staffing levels are not a performance metric in the contract and that incidents such as assaults, sexual assaults or self-harm cannot by themselves be the basis of a financial penalty. Instead, performance is measured by how Secure Journeys “responds to, manages and reports incidents,” the department said.

UWU members are negotiating a new pay deal for staff in detention centres, which Ryan said advances claims for minimum staffing levels and higher salaries to bridge a 16-32% pay gap with correctional officers in prisons. Four-hour stoppages are planned for Thursday and Friday with further action next week.

Shoebridge, the Greens home affairs spokesperson and newly-elected leader, said the detention contract only benefits a “U.S. private prison company that is making bank and cutting corners.”

“The Albanese government is currently preparing a rapid expansion of immigration detention. If you look at the track record of who will profit from that, it is a recipe for disaster.”

A Secure Journeys spokesperson said its “commitment to maintaining safe and secure operations, as well as both staff and detainee welfare remains our top priority”. “Secure Journeys cannot comment on individual matters due to confidentiality reasons.”

The spokesperson said its latest offer “provides meaningful improvements across wages, conditions and rostering, while recognizing the realities of operating in an immigration detention environment.”

Secure Journeys declined to answer questions about penalties paid under the contract.

An Australian Border Force spokesperson said “the welfare, safety and dignity of people in immigration detention, as well as the safety of staff, remain the department’s highest priorities.” The spokesperson said the department had robust oversight mechanisms including closely monitoring performance and requiring “immediate corrective actions and longer-term improvements.”

The department told a Senate estimates committee that it “manages a performance framework which may include financial abatements where contractual requirements are not met”, but refused to specify the number or value of fines because to do so would “prejudice the commercial interests of the service provider and the Commonwealth’s ability to effectively manage the contract.”