A Melbourne woman is fighting to prevent the deportation of her disabled sister, warning the 61-year-old would not survive being sent back to Chile after more than nine years living with family in Australia.
Jacqueline Schmidt Aravena, who has cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability, originally arrived in Australia from Chile on a visitor visa in 2017. She has lived with her sister Marcela, an Australian citizen and aged care and disability support worker, at their Melbourne home ever since.
Marcela said she had been Jacqueline's primary carer for most of her life, fulfilling a promise made to their mother on her deathbed more than 40 years ago. "My mother had cancer and the night before she passed away, she said, 'What is going to happen with Jacqueline?'" Marcela recalled. "I said, 'Don't worry, Jacqueline is going to be okay. I will take care of her.'"
That promise has shaped the past four decades of Marcela's life. When she fell in love and moved to Melbourne in 2005, she paid for a professional carer to look after Jacqueline in Chile and flew back as often as she could. When that arrangement broke down, she worked with a member of parliament to bring Jacqueline to Australia on a visitor visa so she could apply for a remaining relative visa.
That application was refused in 2019. Under the relevant provisions of Australian immigration law, a remaining relative visa requires that all of an applicant's living relatives reside in Australia. Jacqueline's half-siblings in Chile, aged in their 80s and 90s, were deemed by the department to satisfy that requirement, despite their limited capacity to provide care. The pair's brother had been estranged from the family for two decades.
In 2022, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal upheld the department's refusal, acknowledging the limited capacity of Jacqueline's Chilean relatives to care for her but finding the decision was consistent with the law as written.
Two subsequent requests for ministerial intervention were also rejected, the most recent in December 2025. The family's lawyer, Michael Cao of Challenge Legal, said neither application was ever referred to the minister for personal consideration. New procedural directions had narrowed the criteria under which cases can be escalated on compassionate grounds, and the department found Jacqueline did not meet the revised threshold.
"The minister's office found she doesn't meet the new, narrowed criteria. They didn't even refer the case to the minister, which we believe is quite unfair and unfortunate for Jacqueline and her family," Cao said.
Cao has since lodged a third intervention application, this time with written support from Greens senator David Shoebridge. Jacqueline's bridging visa expired last Thursday, leaving the family waiting for word on a renewal while that third application remains with the Department of Home Affairs.
Marcela says Jacqueline is fully integrated into the family's daily life and does not draw on any government support. "My children grew up with Jacqueline and now our grandkids are growing up around her as well," she said. "They love her, she is like a little girl, mentally, so she likes playing with them."
The prospect of deportation, Marcela says, is unthinkable. "She is not going to survive. She would have to go to a nursing home, and nursing homes in Chile are nothing like they are here."
Spokespeople for both Assistant Minister for Immigration Matt Thistlethwaite and the Department of Home Affairs declined to comment on the case, citing privacy reasons.
Rules versus reality
The case sits at a familiar tension in Australian immigration policy. The remaining relative visa exists for a defensible reason: to prevent migration systems from being used as a vehicle for extended family reunification beyond what the programme is designed to support. Governments of both major parties have tightened family visa categories in recent years, citing cost pressures on public services and the integrity of the migration system.
Those arguing for stricter enforcement point out that ministerial intervention powers, while broad in theory, must be applied consistently and sparingly to avoid creating a parallel system where outcomes depend more on public attention than on the merits of a case. The remaining relative visa framework is one of the most tightly defined in the immigration system, and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal found the department's original decision was lawfully made.
At the same time, the practical reality of Jacqueline's situation is difficult to dismiss. She has no realistic care option in Chile. She places no financial burden on Australian taxpayers. She has been embedded in a stable, loving family environment for nearly a decade. Cao's argument, that Jacqueline has always satisfied the spirit of compassionate grounds, carries genuine weight when those facts are laid out plainly.
The procedural question raised by Cao, specifically that the applications never reached the minister personally, is also significant. Ministerial intervention exists precisely to handle cases where the strict application of rules produces outcomes that seem disproportionate to the harm caused. Whether the narrowing of those procedural directions was justified policy or an overly blunt instrument is a question worth putting to the relevant minister directly.
Marcela has launched a Change.org petition seeking public support, which had gathered more than 1,800 signatures as of publication. "We are not asking for special treatment or any kind of financial assistance. We are asking for humanity," she wrote.
The case is, at its core, a test of where the line sits between consistent rule-of-law governance and the capacity of that system to recognise when its own rules produce results that are hard to justify on any humane reading. Reasonable people can disagree on where that line belongs. What is harder to dispute is that a process which never allows a case to reach the decision-maker raises questions about whether the system is functioning as intended.