Australia’s immigration regime is violent and cruel. Labor’s rushed bills will devastate traumatised people

‘A refugee is like a bird that has lost its nest, and it takes years to build a new one,’ Behrouz Boochani writes. Photograph: Hagen Hopkins/The Guardian

As a refugee, when you seek asylum, you experience a complicated bureaucratic process that seems never-ending. This system is a labyrinth of violence where many refugees feel as though they have been sucked in or swallowed whole. Sometimes refugees may feel they have found an open door but soon they realise they have been brought back to the same room they were in years ago. The violence of this system has many faces and has swallowed years, decades, of their lives.

The Australian immigration system has established a vicious cycle of violence that looks to be further entrenched with the three rushed migration bills.