Happy Murugappan family reunites with friends
The Murugappan family were photographed in Perth Children’s Hospital with family friends who arrived from Biloela.
Four-year-old asylum-seeker Tharnicaa Murugappan was smiling with her sister Kopika, 6, in Perth Children’s Hospital on Thursday, finally at the end of more than three years in immigration detention centres.
The Australian-born girls and their parents were photographed in the hospital with family friends who arrived from the Queensland town of Biloela, where the Murugappans lived from 2014 to 2018.
When Priya and Nades Murugappan were declared unlawful non-citizens and the family was moved into a detention centre, their friend Angela Fredericks, a social worker, started a “Home to Bilo” campaign that put up pictures of Tharnicaa and Kopika on billboards in the Brisbane electorate of the then home affairs minister Peter Dutton.
While the family has been released from Christmas Island, where they made close friends with locals while living under guard in a camp since August 2019, their legal battle to stay in Australia is far from over.
Immigration Minister Alex Hawke intervened on Tuesday to allow the Murugappans to live in a house in Perth’s southeast while Tharnicaa receives about eight weeks of post-hospital care for pneumonia and a blood infection.
Nades and Priya Murugappan, both Tamils, arrived by boat from Sri Lanka, but their two daughters were born in Australia.
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