Alison McDonald. Photo: Photo / Jayson Kingsbeer
The head of Immigration New Zealand says she will personally sign off on any further dawn arrests of overstayers.
The government wants such arrests to stop unless there is serious risk or it is otherwise an extreme case.
Nineteen people have been arrested at dawn between last July and April this year, despite the government in 2021 delivering a historic apology for the 1970s-era tactic.
The figure emerged on Tuesday after the lawyer for a Tongan man living in
South Auckland claimed his client was visited at 5am last week, despite having a pathway to residency.
The 1970s dawn raids overwhelmingly targeted Pasifika - while they made up only a third of overstayers, they accounted for 86 percent of all prosecutions. US and UK citizens made up another third of overstayers, but only 5 percent of prosecutions.
Of the 19 visited outside of normal hours since July, 10 were Chinese, four Indian, two Tongan, and one each from Samoa, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Immigration NZ deputy secretary Alison McDonald told Morning Report on Wednesday despite all those being visited at dawn being Pasifika or Asian, there was no racial profiling involved.
"It's representative of a process that we have to go through, the people who we think need to be in a priority order asked to leave the country. There's no racial profiling involved."
Michael Wood. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
Immigration Minister Michael Wood on Tuesday said he had sent a letter of expectations to Immigration NZ "setting out the government's expectation that these sorts of deportations should only occur in extremis - in circumstances that absolutely require it".
McDonald said it was not clear how many overstayers were in New Zealand, nor their countries of origin. The last survey was due "just as the pandemic hit". In 2017, the figure was about 14,000, of which "over half" were Pasifika.
'Most people leave voluntarily'
The man whose case sparked the letter had simply failed to fill out a form to extend his visa, a Pasifika community leader told RNZ.
His lawyer said police showed up banging on the door and blocking potential escape routes, terrifying the man's children. He was taken to Manukau Police Station.
McDonald said Immigration NZ did not arrest people, and treated everyone it dealt with with respect.
"I expect my officers to engage respectfully, to act with professionalism and respect so when they go out in these cases, they knock respectfully on the door and they talk to people... Most people leave voluntarily and most people do that without any kind of harm at all."
Immigration NZ disputed the timing of the visit, saying it was at 6am, not 5am; and it said just 3 percent of visits to potential overstayers were carried outside of normal hours, 7am to 9pm.
"Since the borders have opened, 1.6 million people have come here to visit and stay," McDonald said.
"We've given visas and most of those people will return, or they'll do what they said they wanted to do when they come to New Zealand.
"For those who don't, we have a duty to make sure that we ask them respectfully to leave. We give them lots of notification. We try all means that we can to ask people to leave the country. And most people do. It's very, very rare that we would go out at all, and actually at that time of the day is incredibly rare."
