U.S. pro-life activist deported from Australia over visa flap

Pro-life activist Troy Newman is set to return to the United States after the Australian government ordered him deported for entering the country without a valid visa. Newman, president of Operation Rescue, is a board member of the Center for Medical Progress, the organization that recently released nearly a dozen undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s involvement in fetal tissue trafficking.

Australian officials revoked Newman’s visa after a pro-abortion lawmaker sent a letter to the immigration minister accusing Newman of inciting violence, a claim the pro-life activist vehemently denies.

Newman had planned a 10-day national speaking tour, starting in Melbourne on Friday, with Right to Life Australia. But Australian Border Force officers detained Newman when he arrived at the airport on Thursday, just after 7 a.m. local time, later moving him to solitary confinement at a military base. Newman’s wife Mellissa accompanied him on the trip but was not detained.

Peter Dutton, Australia’s minister for immigration and border protection, said the reason to detain and deport Newman is “entirely related to [Newman’s] decision to … travel to Australia without a valid visa.” The Australian High Court denied Newman’s emergency request to stay in the country because, according to Justice Geoffrey Nettle, Newman entered Australia knowing his visa had been revoked.

Newman ran into trouble before he ever left U.S soil. Evidently on request from the Australian embassy, United Airlines staff prevented him from boarding a Sept. 29 flight from Denver to Los Angeles. Newman and his wife took a different carrier to Los Angeles. Once there, the Newmans got back on their United flight to Melbourne with the boarding passes issued to them in Wichita, Kansas, at the start of their journey, according to Mellissa.

About two-thirds of the way en route from Los Angeles to Australia, Newman posted to Facebook that his visa had been revoked, asking for prayer from supporters.

A Sept. 28 letter to Dutton from MP Terri Butler—who likens abortion to “lawful reproductive medicine”—led calls from the country’s pro-abortion community to cancel Newman’s visa. In the letter, Butler cited a passage from a book Newman and Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy advisor, co-wrote in 2000. In Their Blood Cries Out, the authors state, “The voice of innocent blood cries out continually to God for vengeance. … The United States government has abrogated its responsibility to … execute convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes.”

Dutton has not said why he decided to cancel Newman’s visa. But Sections 116 and 128 of Australia’s Migration Act, allows the government to block anyone whose presence would pose a risk to the “safety or good order” of the community.

Newman contends his opponents have deliberately misconstrued his words, saying the revocation of his visa “was based on a pile of lies.” In Their Blood Cries Out, he advocates changing laws to criminalize abortion. Abortionists could then be prosecuted by the government as murderers deserving capital punishment. Denying he has ever called for vigilante justice, Newman pointed to his “25-year history of peaceful, prayerful action.”

In the late 1980s, Sullenger spent two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to damage an abortion clinic. She said she regretted the 1987 act, later becoming a school teacher at a Christian elementary school and a member of the San Diego County Republican Central Committee. She relocated in 2003 to Operation Rescue’s Wichita headquarters.

Newman’s lawyers will meet in court on Oct. 30 with Australian immigration officials to determine whether the cancellation of Newman’s visa was proper. If his lawyers win the challenge, Newman, an ordained ruling elder in the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), may return to Australia.