SYDNEY, Australia (AFP) -- The abrupt departure of American officials from an Australian Pacific island refugee camp has fanned fears among asylum-seekers that plans to resettle them in the U.S. may not go ahead, an activist group said Sunday.
Canberra sends asylum-seekers who try to enter Australia by boat to camps on Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, but the conditions there have been criticized by refugee advocates and medical professionals.
The Australian government struck a deal with Washington under former president Barack Obama to resettle some of those refugees in the U.S.
But doubts over the arrangement have persisted after President Donald Trump this year reportedly lambasted his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull during a phone call and attacked it as a "dumb deal," before agreeing to go ahead with the proposal.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials had been assessing the asylum-seekers at Nauru as part of the arrangement when they abruptly left the island on Friday and Saturday, Refugee Action Coalition spokesman Ian Rintoul said, days after the U.S. passed its annual 50,000-refugee intake cap.
"They've (the DHS officials) given the people on Nauru no indication that they are coming back," Rintoul told AFP.
About 200 refugees on Nauru have undergone interviews and medical check-ups, while on Manus, some 70 had been through a similar process, Rintoul said.
"People are becoming increasingly doubtful that there is any deal," he added.
The situation is particularly acute on Manus, with the camp set to close by October after a PNG Supreme Court ruling declared that holding people there was unconstitutional.
Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has said those on Manus would not be moved to Australia and instead relocated to third countries such as the U.S. and Cambodia or resettled in PNG.
"News like this makes us feel dead. It defuses the spark of hope that we try to hold on to," Manus refugee detainee Imran Mohammad, from Myanmar, said in a statement Sunday via Australia's Human Rights Law Centre.
More than 800 men are being held on Manus, and 370 men, women and children are detained on Nauru, according to Australian immigration data ending May 31.