Govt insists US refugee deal is still on

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says US refugee processing on Nauru is happening as expected, despite officials leaving the camp two weeks earlier than scheduled.

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says the US refugee deal is still going ahead. (AAP)

The Turnbull government insists a deal for the United States to take refugees from Nauru and Manus Island is still on despite officials leaving the offshore detention centre earlier than planned.

US immigration officials halted screening interviews and left Nauru on Friday, a day after Washington said it had reached its annual refugee intake cap, Reuters reported.

A senior member of the union that represents refugee officers said his own work trip to Nauru had been pushed back and it was unclear whether it would actually happen.

But Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says the US screening process is "progressing as we expected".

"They have a quota (of refugees) each year and the quota will roll over again on 1 October as I said, and I expect that the United States will adhere to this agreement, as the president promised the United States would," Ms Bishop told ABC TV on Sunday.

US Citizen and Immigration Services spokesman Carter Langston said the department would send officers back to the Australian-run offshore detention centres.

"The Nauru/Manus refugee program is continuing," he told AAP in a statement.

"We do not discuss the exact dates of USCIS' circuit rides to adjudicate refugees' applications; however, we are planning return trips."

Refugee advocates say only 70 refugees have completed US processing - less than 10 per cent of those in the camp - but Ms Bishop denied there was any "go-slow" happening.

Labor frontbencher Richard Marles said people seized on every snippet of news about the resettlement deal because it was critical to getting people off the islands.

"The Abbott-Turnbull government has been singularly hopeless in arranging third-party resettlement arrangements for those who have been on Manus and Nauru," he told ABC TV.

"All their eggs now are in the US basket," he told ABC TV.

Ms Bishop said any criticism of asylum seeker policy from Labor was laughable.

The government was working to find other countries to resettle refugees, she said.

GetUp human rights campaigner Matthew Phillips said the ongoing uncertainty around the resettlement deal with the US had left refugees in a situation that was at crisis point.


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Published 16 July 2017 12:18pm
Source: AAP


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