“My dad was murdered there. The people that murdered my dad are still around … I fear the same thing will happen to me.”
Mohamed Coker, 33, spoke to Guardian Australia on his way to the airport.
After almost a decade in immigration detention he was told on Saturday morning that, within hours, he would be deported to Sierra Leone, a country he left at five years of age after his father, a police officer, was killed in the civil war.
In Australia he has a mother, Gloria; a partner, Princess George; and an 11-year-old son, Joshua; all of whom are Australian citizens. In Sierra Leone he has nobody.
But that is where the Australian government plans to send him, after his application for a protection visa was refused about four years ago.
Lawyer Alison Battisson said a week ago Coker was informed he could be deported “on or from” 6 April, but his deportation has moved with unusual haste.
Battisson is concerned the government hasn’t “updated its information, nobody knows what’s happening in Sierra Leone”. Smart Traveller warns of “the threat of violent crime and the risk of civil unrest”, particularly after a failed coup attempt in late 2023.
Gloria, Coker’s mother, said that Sierra Leone “is not peaceful, they’re killing people every day”. “He doesn’t know Sierra Leone, he doesn’t know anybody.”
After escaping to Guinea as a child, Coker came to Australia on a humanitarian visa in his teens but his visa was cancelled after a conviction for grievous bodily harm.
“I was doing everything right until that day,” Coker said. “A few boys attacked me and my friends. I was afraid – there were so many of them. One of them ended up getting stabbed. I don’t know if it was me. Since then my life has been upside down.”
When Coker was sent to prison his partner, Princess, was pregnant with their son. After he served his sentence he was taken into immigration detention, including in Sydney, away from his family in Brisbane.
He has never met his son Joshua in person, communicating only through phone and video calls.
“I’m not a bad person … I just made one mistake,” Coker said. “I didn’t come to this country to commit crime, I came for a better life.”
“I just need a second chance to prove I’m not a bad person. I want to be with my son. My dad was not in my life … My dad was murdered – I don’t want [Joshua] going through the same, not knowing his dad.”
Princess George said: “They’re taking him without his consent. You can’t just grab somebody, without him knowing what instability he will face.”
“Whats going to happen with his son? His son is a citizen. What happened to human rights in all of this?”
“Joshua will be fatherless … He always cries and says ‘why can Dad never come to my soccer game, all my friends have their dad’.
“He’s going to lose focus and crash, he’s going to be depressed.”
Shortly after noon on Saturday, Coker said his flight would depart at 3:30pm.
At the time, Battisson feared she would lose the ability to communicate with him, and that it would be “game over” because Australia would never allow him to re-enter the country given his criminal record.
Later on Saturday afternoon Battisson applied for an emergency injunction to prevent Coker’s deportation on the basis an application for ministerial intervention she filed on 1 April had not been brought to the minister’s attention.
The government gave an undertaking not to remove Coker until a further court hearing.
Even with the temporary reprieve, it’s a scene that could be repeated more easily if the government’s deportation bill passes the parliament.
The bill creates powers for the immigration minister to require unlawful non-citizens to cooperate in their deportation, on the threat of a minimum of a year in prison if they refuse. The bill also expands ministerial powers to reverse protection findings.
According to the government, the bill is “necessary to address circumstances where non-citizens who have no valid reason to remain in Australia and who have not left voluntarily as expected, are not cooperating with appropriate and lawful efforts to remove them”.
Battisson said the issue with the bill is that many people have made protection claims “years ago” but “the situation on the ground has changed”.
She said Coker’s pending deportation is part of the government’s “general approach of out-Duttoning [Peter] Dutton”, a reference to Labor’s efforts to replicate the opposition leader and former home affairs minister’s hard-line approach to non-citizens.
“We are so incredibly hard now,” Battisson said. “I’m surprised … they haven’t invited [Coker] to reapply and reassess his claims.”
Gloria said: “I feel like I’m dying now – Australia [wants to] return my son to a country he doesn’t know. All my relatives have been killed in the civil war, everybody died.”
“Why is Australia doing this to me? They’re taking my soul away.”
Guardian Australia contacted the home affairs and immigration ministers, Australian Border Force, and the home affairs department for comment.
