Last Saturday, hundreds of people seeking asylum hit the streets to fight for their rights in rallies in Sydney and Melbourne. They are part of a movement that emerged in the middle of this year and has taken almost everyone by surprise.

In Australia, the campaign against the internationally renowned cruelty of our border regime normally consists of dedicated but rather formulaic demonstrations of Australian citizen supporters. In stark contrast, rallies planned by the group Justice for Refugees, a group of people seeking asylum organizing across Australia, have mostly consisted of people seeking asylum themselves. This new phenomenon has caught the wider left in Australia off guard, with most progressive activists and journalists seemingly oblivious to their struggle.

The majority of those taking part in these rallies are from the so-called legacy caseload, a group of approximately thirty thousand people who arrived by sea to claim asylum between 2012 and 2014 from a variety of countries around the world, including Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Burma, and Sri Lanka. These are people who were prevented from making applications for protection until 2017; then, when they were finally granted this right, they were forced into the “fast-track” process, a heavily flawed, fundamentally unjust system designed to effectively deny real appeal rights to applicants.