Alleged sex trafficking boss deported over underground prostitution network
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An alleged human trafficking boss who exploited Australia’s migration regime to set up a sprawling underground sex worker racket has been hunted down and deported amid a major shake-up of border security.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles will on Wednesday unveil the latest in a series of reforms to the visa system aimed at stopping what an inquiry led by ex-police chief Christine Nixon has described as the grotesque exploitation of foreign workers.
Binjun Xie is escorted to a plane after being arrested.
Among the reforms are the establishment of a new immigration compliance division within the Department of Home Affairs. A new multi-agency taskforce investigating suspected sex and drug traffickers, known to specialise in obtaining visas via fraud, will also run for at least two more years.
The reforms have been prompted by the Trafficked series of reports by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, 60 Minutes and Stan, which also forced the Albanese government to commission the Nixon inquiry.
This masthead has also confirmed that Border Force agents recently swooped on Binjun Xie, the alleged Sydney-based human trafficking kingpin who has been on the run since several serious allegations against him were exposed in the Trafficked investigation in November.
The reforms are aimed at helping the Albanese government wrest back control of a migration and visa system racked with rorting, worker and student exploitation and delays.
The government will also crack down on domestic migration agents, who help tens of thousands of foreign nationals navigate the visa system to study, work or settle in Australia.
Agents will face stricter background checks and vetting, while the regulatory agency that oversees them will be given more powers to investigate and penalise agents. However, the government is yet to commit to regulating overseas based agents or introducing the wider anti-money laundering regime called for by Nixon, a former Victorian police commissioner.
The continuing overhaul of the migration system comes after the Albanese government earlier this week announced related reforms aimed at combatting corruption in the overseas education sector, including a new anti-corruption unit to police the nation’s vocational and training industry and combat dodgy education agents.
Trafficked unveiled allegations of visa rorting, human trafficking and exploitation in Australia, including in a booming underground prostitution industry controlled by organised criminals such as Xie.
Xie has been deported.Credit: 60 Minutes
The expulsion of Xie – a Chinese triad snakehead known by UK police as The Hammer due to his ruthless disposition – comes a decade after he illegally entered Australia to allegedly rebuild the sex trafficking empire shut down by British authorities, who jailed Xie in Britain in 2013.
Xie allegedly set up a nationwide sex network that police warned was moving Asian women around Australia like “cattle”.
Xie’s story served as a powerful case study of failings in the migration system, given his ability not only to enter and remain in Australia despite his serious criminal past but the ease with which he worked with corrupt migration and education agents to procure dodgy visas for overseas sex workers who faced extreme risk of exploitation after entering Australia.
Trafficked also revealed how state and federal agencies had spent years issuing confidential warnings about migration rorting involving syndicates gaming the visa system to bring criminals or exploited workers into Australia, a problem confirmed by Nixon in her inquiry.
Trafficked also led to the creation of a new multi-agency taskforce, Inglenook. Official data released by the government this week reveals that in addition to Xie’s arrest and deportation, Inglenook has blocked 45 foreign nationals with Australian visas and who are deemed “known facilitators” of visa fraud from re-entering Australia.
Another 79 facilitators have separately been refused immigration clearance, while more than 165 “persons of interest” have been probed to “determine complicity in exploiting the temporary visa program.”
In July, this masthead and 60 Minutes revealed that violent Albanian mafia figures were similarly exploiting the visa system to move narcotics and people into Australia.
In her inquiry, Nixon concluded that it was clear that “gaps and weaknesses” in Australia’s visa system were enabling criminal organisations to exploit people and make money.
She called on the government to reform the visa and migration system, the overseas education sector, law enforcement responses and sex industry rules to help combat “abhorrent crimes” that Nixon warned had remained partially hidden by “seemingly higher law enforcement priorities such as illicit drugs, tobacco and unauthorised maritime arrivals”.
Notably absent from the Albanese government’s decision to release its reform package over three days this week was the suspended Home Affairs secretary Michael Pezzullo. For a decade, Pezzullo led the department that various inquiries have found was not doing enough to safeguard the visa system from exploitation.
Separately, Pezzullo remains the subject of an investigation by the Australian Public Service Commissioner regarding hundreds of leaked texts which he exchanged with Liberal Party powerbroker Scott Briggs.
While the outcome of the investigation is yet to be reached, it is unlikely he will return to his post, government sources said.
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