A Senate committee hearing on Monday forced by the coalition, Greens and crossbench last month delayed the government's attempt to push through the legislation.
The proposed amendments would impose a minimum one-year minimum prison term and up to five years behind bars for people who refuse to co-operate with the government over their deportation.
It would also give the home affairs minister unilateral power to ban visa classes for relatives of asylum seekers from blacklisted countries that don't accept the deportees.
People from Iran, Iraq, Russia and South Sudan have been floated as possible targets of the ban but no exhaustive list has been released by the government.
"The criminalisation of non co-operative removal, however that concept is defined, is globally unprecedented - no other country does this," Sanmati Verma, acting legal director of the Human Rights Law Centre, told the hearing on Monday.
"We talk about a Trump-style travel ban and it will be a sad day when we talk about an Albanese-style criminalisation of non co-operation."
Piumetharshika Kaneshan, a 19-year-old nursing student from Canberra who escaped Sri Lanka with her family, said the threat of being jailed or deported was a heavy burden to carry.
"I am... one of the people who might be jailed, if this bill is passed into law."
She said she was representing a group of Iranian and Sri Lankan women whose cases have been held up by the Abbott government's fast-track system reviewing their protection claims about a decade ago.
"This is our home, we don't have any other home... don't make us lose our homes."
Green Senator David Shoebridge, who sits on the committee, described the proposed legislation as "one of the worst bills I have seen in my time in parliament".
He said the forcible deportation aspect of the bill was globally unique in its cruelty and the travel ban was ineffective in changing the behaviour of rogue regimes.
"I doubt Vladimir Putin is shaking in his boots about what (Immigration Minister) Andrew Giles is going to do on an immigration provision," Senator Shoebridge added.
Senator David Shoebridge says the bill's forcible deportation is "globally unique in its cruelty". (Lukas Coch/AAP PHOTOS)
But Western Australian Labor Senator Varun Ghosh argued the bill was necessary, measured and overdue.
Australian Human Rights Commission president Rosalind Croucher was also against the passage of the bill for its bracketing of thousands of non-citizens from blacklisted countries rather than being assessed on a case-by-case basisÂ
"A punitive approach informs the whole bill," she told senators on Monday.
"The problem for the commission is ... treating slabs of people as cohorts rather than as individual people."
Debate over the laws come ahead of a High Court decision on Wednesday involving an Iranian citizen known as ASF17 who has made a legal bid for freedom.
The man is seeking to have an earlier High Court ruling, that indefinite immigration detention was illegal for those who could not be returned to a third country, also cover detainees who refuse to co-operate with their deportation.
