"This is what deportation looks like." Waleed Aly's powerful words about distressing footage of Tamil family.

Priya has two officials, one on either arm, telling her “it’s going to be fine” as her two daughters are crying in distress just metres away from her.

“My baby crying,” she tells them.

“My hand so painful,” Priya informs the officials, as they suggest she “just relax”.

Priya, her husband Nadesalingam and their Australian-born children Kopika, four-years-old, and Tharunicaa, two, are being deported.

On Friday night, The Project showed distressing footage of these scenes, as the Tamil asylum seeker family had been forcibly dragged onto a plane at Melbourne airport the night prior.

The family was loaded into seperate vans, before being taken on a private charter plane.

The vision sees Priya refuse to get on the plane, before she is dragged by officials as she howls in protest. Her kids are screaming.

“We hear about deportation and the threat asylum seekers face all the time, we are almost desensitised to it,” journalist Waleed Aly said before the footage played.

“Usually, it’s in reference to nameless faceless people, but these are those people, and this is exactly what deportation looks like.”

While the plane was en-route to Sri Lanka on Thursday night, it was forced to land in Darwin as a Federal court judge granted a last-minute temporary order to stop the Tamil family from being deported.

The two-year-old daughter had never had her claim for a protection visa assessed, and hence Federal Court Judge Mordy Bromberg extended the injunction on Friday.

The family’s legal team say only the youngest daughter is protected under the injunction and the rest of her family could be legally deported, but their lawyer Carina Ford said Australia would be condemned if the family was split up.

On Saturday morning it was revealed the family has been transported to Christmas Island overnight. They have been given a reprieve against deportation from Australia, until Wednesday, September 4.

Nades and Priya came to Australia separately in 2012 and 2013, fleeing Sri Lanka during the civil war. They married in Australia, and their children were both born here. The family fears if they return, they will still be persecuted in the country over their links to the Tamil cause.

The family of four were living in the close-knit rural community of Biloela, in Central Queensland. until March 2018 when they were taken from their home and placed into custody.

A change.org petition has been launched by Biloela locals distraught by the family's removal. The petition has since reached more than 218,000 signatures. Numerous vigils and protests have been made including a protest at Melbourne Airport on Thursday night.

Despite mounting community pressure, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton is refusing to budge.

"I would like the family to accept that they are not refugees, they're not owed protection by our country," he told the Nine Network on Friday.

Mr Dutton said the deportation had been years in the making and should surprise no-one, least of all the couple, who had been warned prior to having children that they would not be allowed to stay.

- With AAP.