Sri Lankan family living in Australia granted permanent residency

MELBOURNE, Australia — Four years ago, immigration officers arrived in the dawn to rip a Sri Lankan family from the life they had built in the tiny Australian town of Biloela. The authorities rejected the claims for asylum filed by the mother, Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam and father, Nadesalingam Murugappan, who had fled Sri Lanka. Their visas had expired, and the couple, together with their two Australia-born daughters, Kopika, 2, and 9-month-old Tharnicaa, were taken into immigration detention. As the conservative government tried to deport them to Sri Lanka several times, their supporters campaigned for their release, turning the family into symbols of what human rights groups have called a draconian approach to asylum seekers and refugees in Australia.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said in a statement that the decision to grant permanent residency is a result of careful consideration of the complex and specific circumstances of the Nadesalingam family. He said that the government would continue to intercept asylum seekers who traveled to Australia and return them to their point of origin. In June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signaled that the family had reason for hope, as the government was about to make its decision. He said that we were a generous nation. We are a better nation than one that takes two little girls out of their home in the middle of the night and shuffles them off to Melbourne and sends them to Christmas Island for four years at a cost of double figures of millions of dollars to taxpayers. The parents, who did not meet until they had traveled to Australia, are members of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka and had fled violence in their homeland, where a civil war raged for decades before ending in 2009. They left Sri Lanka a few years later and wound up in Biloela before they were detained and sent to a detention center in Melbourne for a year and then transferred to the remote Christmas Island, 1,000 miles north of the Australian mainland, where they stayed for three years. The family's two girls, Kopika, now 7, and Tharnicaa, now 5, were the only children held in immigration detention in Australia. They went to school on the island escorted by security guards. The call for the family to be released gained a lot of attention last year when Tharnicaa was evacuated to a hospital in the Australian city of Perth while battling a blood infection. Supporters of the family said she was only given painkillers for nearly two weeks while her fever rose despite pleas from her parents. The family's future became an issue in the campaign, as it was a prelude to the federal election in May this year. The family had been assessed several times and denied by the conservative Liberal Party, but they vowed not to let them stay permanently. The Labor Party largely mirrored the Liberal Party's hard-line immigration stance, vowing to continue the policy that no asylum seekers arriving by boat would never resettle in Australia. If elected, it promised that it would allow the family to return to Biloela.