Australian children held in increasingly “militarised” displacement camps in north-east Syria have been told they will be shot if they try to breach the fence line, as Australia refuses to issue its citizens with passports so they can be repatriated.

The US has offered to bring the Australians out of the camps on the proviso they have been issued with travel documents or passports, a condition to which Australia has not agreed.

“[The] government doesn’t have a plan to get people out of the camps at this time,” the home affairs minister is recorded as telling advocates in a meeting earlier this year.

The US government wants the camps closed, and has repeatedly urged all countries to repatriate their citizens, arguing leaving women and children in the Syrian camps makes them vulnerable to radicalisation and raises the risk of Islamic State regenerating.

There are fewer than 40 Australians – the majority young children – held in two detention camps in north-east Syria. They are the wives, widows and children of dead or jailed Islamic State fighters.

Most have been held in the Roj camp near the Turkish border since 2019. The Guardian understands there are 12 Australian women, and between 22 and 25 Australian children, in Roj. Some of the children were born in the camp.

The Australians in the camps have not been charged with a crime and do not face warrants for arrest, although they could face charges on return to Australia.

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In June the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, and government officials met with the chief executive of Save the Children, Mat Tinkler, and Kamalle Dabboussy, an advocate and father of a previously repatriated Australian, at Burke’s Punchbowl electorate office.

Contemporaneous notes of the meeting typed by a senior public servant were tendered to Senate estimates this week.

Those notes recorded: “The camps are becoming more militarised, intrusive and securitised. The kids are being weaponised against their mothers ie if they go beyond the fence lines they will be shot. There is a reducing range of activities further impacting on the women and children.”

Sources from within the camps have confirmed that women and children have been warned that any unauthorised breaches of the camp perimeter will be met with force. A Syrian source characterised the direction as “shoot first and ask questions later”.

The official’s notes of the June meeting record that the minister was told Kurdish forces controlling the detention camps “will allow people to leave if the government would provide assurances that passports will be issued”.

“Minister [Burke] responded that this is not something the government is considering at this time,” the notes state. “Minister stated there may be a way to achieve the same outcome without government undertakings.”

The official was then asked to leave the meeting “to enable a frank discussion to take place”.

In a subsequent letter sent in August to the minister, Dabboussy and Tinkler wrote that the US had confirmed an offer to move Australians out of the camps, saying the US was willing “to facilitate the repatriation of foreign nationals … safely and securely”.

Australia has undertaken two successful repatriation missions – of eight orphaned children in 2019, and of four women and 13 children in 2022 – but has consistently said it has “doesn’t have a plan” to repatriate the final cohort still held in the camps.

In October, two women and four children escaped al-Hawl detention camp nearer to Iraq, making their way across Syria to Lebanon, where they were given passports at the Australian embassy. They returned to Australia on a commercial flight. It’s unclear if there are any more Australians in al-Hawl camp.

In 2024, Clare O’Neil as home affairs minister was preparing to bring a plan to repatriate the remaining Australians to cabinet for approval. But there were concerns within government over backlash to any repatriation from community groups in electorally critical marginal seats in western Sydney, despite the fact many of those still held in Roj camp are from Victoria and seek to return there.

“The government will not revisit the issue before the next election,” a government source said, prior to this year’s May poll.

The repatriation plan was delayed, and then ultimately abandoned.

At an earlier meeting in late 2024, the secretary of the department of home affairs, Stephanie Foster, took handwritten notes which appear to reflect the perceived political sensitivities.

Also tendered to the Senate this week, one note attributed to “TB” – understood to be Burke – said: “politics harder at this end of term”.

“Can’t see way to navigate earlier.”

Burke told the Guardian the meeting notes confirm the government’s position. “There was a request from Save the Children to conduct a repatriation operation. It was refused. There was no repatriation and no assistance.”

Foster’s notes also record there were “drone attacks, less (sic) guards” at the camps, as well as “concern about getting through winter”.

Dysentery outbreaks are common across Roj, and the latrines regularly back up during frigid winters, when temperatures drop well below freezing and snow sits on the ground. Influenza spreads quickly across populations living in close quarters in dilapidated tents, particularly among underdeveloped and undernourished children, and fires regularly break out in camp tents. Heating fuel is reportedly running low. One Australian child developed frostbite in a previous winter.

Human Rights Watch has described “inhuman, degrading, and life-threatening conditions” in the camps, saying the indefinite detention of the women and children, without charge or trial, was unlawful.

The US, which funds the bulk of security operations across north-east Syria through the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and has assisted dozens of repatriation missions, wants to draw down its commitment from Syria.

The Trump administration has cut $117m in US humanitarian assistance to north-east Syria this year, forcing the shuttering of projects providing medical assistance, psychological support and safe spaces for children.

The inspector general for the US’s Operation Inherent Resolve across Syria and Iraq reported that IS “continues to seek to indoctrinate residents and to infiltrate the detention facilities” at Roj. One IS incursion caused the death of a woman and a child.

The commander of US Central Command, Adm Brad Cooper, told a UN conference in September “as time goes on, these camps are incubators for radicalisation”.

“This problem will only get worse with time … inaction is not an option. Every day without repatriation compounds the risk to all of us.”

Cooper called on “every nation with detained or displaced personnel in Syria to return your citizens”.

“Repatriating vulnerable populations before they are radicalised is not just compassion – it is a decisive blow against Isis’s ability to regenerate,” he said.