A Werribee woman is fighting for her right to stay in Australia after more than a decade of detention and legal limbo.
Sara, not her real name, fled Iran on a boat in 2013 as a 26-year-old with the hope of seeking asylum in Australia.
Now 38, she has still not been granted asylum and her latest application to extend her visa has been rejected.
“I feel like I am in a game – I am not happy,” Sara said.
“I am exhausted and I can’t get back my youth.”
Living on bridging visa E (subclass 050), which she has been extending every six months for the past two years, is a life of uncertainty.
She has no working rights, is not allowed to study, has limited access to Medicare and must survive on a Centrelink payment of less than $200 a week.
“I begged [the federal government] for permission to give me the right to study,” Sara said.
“I could be a helpful person in my community, but I don’t have an identity.”
The past 12 years have been marked by traumatic events and a series of waiting games, Sara said,
Soon after escaping Iran, the damaged boat she was on was seized and she was detained on Christmas Island for more than eight months.
She said she was then transferred to Nauru where she lived in detention until 2019.
Trips to Papua New Guinea in 2015 and Taiwan in 2018, both for urgent medical treatment, were the only times she left the island in more than five years.
Her first two years on Australian soil were spent in detention at the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation (MITA).
In 2021, she was given permission to live in community detention.
Sara said she avoids dwelling on the past because she cannot change it.
“The point is to do what I can today, because each person has their own history to make,“ she said.
“Each situation gives you a lesson, so that is how you keep moving forward.”
She said her faith and the power to be kind have been her pillars strength.
Sara believes the silver lining in her story is the people she has met at West Welcome Wagon, a not-for-profit organisation based in Sunshine West.
The organisation helps more than 2800 asylum seekers and refugees in the western suburbs with goods such as furniture.
West Welcome Wagon’s operations and community engagement co-ordinator Fay Salem-Demezierers is someone Sara has grown particularly close with.
Fay said Sara’s most recent visa rejection meant she no longer has the chance to apply for refugee status in Australia.
“[The government] has basically said your options now are to stay living as you are on this bridging visa or leave the country,“ Fay said.
“Her application has failed and at the moment the current government isn’t sending people like her back because it is not deemed safe.
“But that could change at any time –it is frightening.”
Sara has sought hope elsewhere, but her asylum application to the United States was cancelled by the first Trump administration in 2017 and her application for New Zealand has not progressed in two years.
Fay said time is of the essence.
“You have got to factor in the Iranian government, too,” she said.
“People leaving illegally are punished–as a woman she will end up locked up at the very least for sure.”
She said if Sara was sent back to Iran, the West Welcome Wagon community would be “devastated.”
“We are all equal regardless of where we were born and what our culture is and therefore we all deserve to be treated the same and have the same opportunities in life.”
“People aren’t coming here just because they were bored with their previous life, people are escaping with their lives, they are escaping war, physical trauma, sexual abuse.”
“We need to open up our doors and our hearts to them.”
Fay said Sara does everything in her power to reciprocate the generosity she receives.
“She is just so giving and caring, you know Sara won’t come to our warehouse without providing a packet of Persian biscuits for me to take home to my daughter,” she said.
“When she is there and we help her– she’ll be back and stay there to volunteer as well.”
The Department of Home Affairs was contacted for comment.
