Daniel Love – the Aboriginal man released today from immigration detention after facing deportation to Papua New Guinea, a country he left when he was five years old – is not the first Indigenous person to be threatened with deportation from Australia.

Lawyers and advocates have described other cases to BuzzFeed News in which Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people have ended up in immigration detention, with one saying that “probably a month doesn’t go by” where he doesn’t come across an Indigenous person who is in immigration detention or facing visa cancellation. In some cases, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people have been deported.

The reasons for this are varied and complex, but include a huge increase in visa cancellations on character grounds in the last four years and the fact that some Indigenous people do not know they are not Australian citizens.

Rod Little, co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, told BuzzFeed News that it wasn’t “right” that Aboriginal people who’d spent most of their lives in Australia should be deported. “If you’re an Aboriginal person, this is your land,” he said.

One Aboriginal man in New South Wales recently spent over seven months in immigration detention facing possible deportation to New Zealand before his visa was reinstated, according to his lawyer.

The lawyer Daniel Ghezelbash, director of Macquarie University’s Social Justice Clinic and special counsel to the National Justice Project, describes his client as being “in a similar position” to Love. His client was born in New Zealand and moved to Australia at a young age.

The man’s permanent resident visa was automatically cancelled after he was sentenced to imprisonment for a number of offences.

The visa cancellation came as a surprise to Ghezelbash’s client, who was not aware that he was not an Australian citizen.

Aboriginal people are “the original inhabitants of this land”, Ghezelbash told BuzzFeed News. “They trace their lineage to long before the arrival of white people and these immigration laws which were imposed on them.

“It’s just preposterous to tell an Aboriginal man or woman who’s traced their lineage back in this country tens of thousands of years that they’re not citizens and they’re being deported.”

While he was still serving his sentence, the man appealed the decision to cancel the visa. When he finished his jail term, he was transferred to immigration detention, where he waited until the government eventually reversed the decision and his visa was reinstated. While Love was released today after nearly two months in detention, Ghezelbash's client sat for over seven months before his release.

“If you are Aboriginal and you have the misfortune of not having citizenship for whatever reason, there is no mechanism in place to screen for this,” Ghezelbash said.