EXCLUSIVE
An elderly grandmother fighting to stay in after 40 years says she is now facing a new ‘torture’ at the hands of migration officials trying to kick her out.
Mary Ellis, 75, has made her 35th plea for a bridging visa to avoid being arrested and deported out the country in handcuffs.
But now she says migration officials have taken away the last thing she thought was truly hers.
Instead of applying under her name Mary Philomena Ellis, her Department Case Officer is insisting she must call herself Mary McHugo instead.
That was Ms Ellis’s married name back in England, which she hasn’t used for almost half a century since she separated from her first husband.
Gold Coast migration agent Stanley Shneider has been helping Ms Ellis gain n citizenship and described the latest development as ‘absurd’.
‘She has for 45 or so years used the surname Ellis, quite legally and properly,’ he said.
‘And everything she has done in has been as Mary Philomena Ellis and not Mary Philomena McHugo. It’s absurd.’
Ms Ellis first went on television last year to beg the Department of Home Affairs to let her stay in after she was threatened with deportation.
She claimed she ‘doesn’t know a soul’ in her native UK, and insisted she had never left since her arrival in 1981.
Ms Ellis said Home Affairs’ claims she left three times under an alias between 1983 and 1986 were untrue, as were allegations her late second husband Martin Ellis was really a man named Trevor Warren.
A Daily Mail investigation revealed that, according to her daughter back in England, Ms Ellis had indeed flown back to the UK during the early 1980s, disqualifying her from ‘absorbed’ citizenship under ‘s migration rules.
Mr Shneider had previously urged former Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Andrew Giles – who has been succeeded in the portfolio by Tony Burke – to use his power to recognise his client as an ‘absorbed person’.
But now Ms Ellis’ case worker is insisting she make every bridging visa – which she has to apply for every three months – as Mary McHugo.
Ms Ellis was only 19 when she married soldier Sean McHugo in Lambeth, south London in 1968, and the following year their daughter Angela was born in the same area.
It is believed that Angela’s brother David McHugo was born in 1971, though no record of his birth could be found in England and Wales.
The marriage broke down and Ms Ellis began a relationship with Martin Ellis – a name which the n government now say was actually an alias for Trevor Warren.
Recalling how her mother left the UK with her two children, daughter Angela said: ‘She and Trevor, her partner at the time, had always wanted to go to .
‘Trevor had at least one sister living there, perhaps two. Mum and Trevor went over to first as a test-run. Then we all went out as a family.
‘But my brother and I hated it out there. Absolutely hated it. I was only there for about eight months.
‘I was about 15 at the time and I came home to the UK and lived with an aunt. My brother came back and joined the British Army. I haven’t seen my mum since I was 17.’
Her brother David meanwhile married in Canterbury, Kent, in July 1995. He spent the first part of his career in the UK and only emigrated to in later years.
David, 53, is now a company director and provides project management to the rail sector around Sydney. Ms Ellis’ ex-husband Sean McHugo remarried in 1988, but he died 20 years later in Medway, Kent.
Ms Ellis told Daily Mail that on arrival in in 1981, her partner told her he acquired permanent residency visas for them both – which she discovered to her shock was not true decades later.
In an interview with ‘s Nine Network, she said: ‘I have a Driver’s Licence, ID card, Medicare Card, Pension card. Everything ns have.
‘I thought well, I’m a permanent resident. You know, I carry on doing what I do every day. Nobody said anything.’
The discovery came when the pensioner was asked to visit the Brisbane office of the Home Affairs department, where she was told she had been living in illegally.
The grandmother worked in hospitality and then for the New South Wales government for 30 years.
Mr Shneider who initially described Home Affairs’ claims that she had left the country under an alias three times since her arrival in 1981 as ‘nonsense’.
Mr Shneider dodged questions about Angela’s claims that her mother had returned to the UK in 1986.
‘I have accepted Mary’s instructions in good faith and until it is established otherwise I will maintain those instructions,’ he said.
A popular figure in her community due to the time she spends volunteering and raising money for The Salvation Army, Ms Ellis also worked in home care.
But threats to deport her have frightened Ms Ellis, who has has wide support on social media for her to stay.
Home Affairs told Daily Mail that the minister’s personal intervention powers were only enlivened under certain sections of Migration Act, which are when a person is refused a visa, or a review tribunal refuses to intervene in the case.
However Mr Shneider insisted Ms Ellis had not applied for an absorbed person visa – because under the Migration Act no-one can, it is just a status that is acquired if you qualify – and therefore she had not been refused a visa.
Mr Shneider said the part of the Migration Act which gives the minister the power to intervene was at best narrow, or at worst a kind of Catch 22.
The tide of opinion in Facebook discussions about Ms Ellis’s case is squarely behind her and firmly against the government’s immigration laws.
One woman wrote online: ‘For goodness sake this is outrage, she so deserves to stay.
‘The Immigration Minister needs to to fix this! Surely common decency on behalf of the Minister should automatically be granted!
‘What on earth does the Immigration Department come to when we don’t deport people who should be jailed and deported a good Scout who has done nothing wrong in the 40 years she has lived here!!!’