Will U.S. policy drive Asylum seekers here?
Separating families may be a defining moment for joint refugee agreement
The scenes from the southern U.S. border are heartbreaking: Inconsolable toddlers crying for their parents; mothers told their children are going to be bathed, only to realize they ’ve been taken away indefinitely; parents deported without their children.
It seems a long way to the border of Mexico. But the new U.S. policy to separate children from their parents in immigration detention may soon be felt on the border with Canada as well, with greater numbers of asylum seekers fleeing Trump’s America.
The U.S. has never been less safe, say Canadian refugee advocates, renewing their calls to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement and do away with our own practice of detaining children.
The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) between the U.S. and Canada, in force since 2004, stipulates that refugee claimants must seek asylum in the first safe country they encounter. Although it only applies to official borders, it means people can be turned back if they try to claim refugee status in the next country.
But the underlying premise — that Canada and the U.S. have equivalent refugee policies — has been contested ever since, and especially since the election of Donald Trump.
Last year, the Canadian Council for Refugees, Amnesty International and the Canadian Council of Churches launched a legal challenge of the agreement that will be heard in court in January.
They cited significant injustices in the U.S. system including “expedited removal” from the U.S., whereby asylum seekers can be deported without a proper hearing; the prosecution of asylum seekers who have entered the country irregularly; and widespread immigration detention.
According to Amnesty International, which conducted interviews with claimants crossing into Quebec in March 2017, these policies have been fuelling the drive north through New York.
For Janet Dench, the executive director of the CCR, recent immigration policies introduced by Trump further underline that the U.S. is not a safe country for refugees. Last week, Trump overturned asylum protections for victims of gang violence and domestic abuse — the grounds for a lot of women and minors from Central America who are seeking protection, Dench said. And since April, at least 2,300 children have been separated from their parents and put into detention themselves.
“Parents don’t know what’s happening to their kids,” Dench said. “There is an extremely high level of trauma inflicted on these kids in circumstances that are absolutely appalling.”
The detentions won’t have a direct impact on the numbers coming into Quebec — people will be deported from jail, without the option of coming to Canada, she said.
“But what we generally see is that when a government blocks one door, then people ... will look for an alternative door,” Dench said. “So will people find some other way into the U.S. or up to Canada? That, we’ll see.”
The numbers of people crossing into Quebec in May were down, compared with April — 1,775 compared with 2,479 — but they are still well above the pre-Trump numbers.
According to the Canada Border Services Agency, the top five source countries for migrants were the same as in previous months: Nigeria, the U.S., Colombia, Pakistan and Haiti, with U.S.-born children of other nationals accounting for their No. 2 position. (In 2017, the U.S. was the No. 3 source country.)
The CBSA’s Dominic McNeely wouldn’t speculate as to why there were fewer people crossing in May. But the agency has contingency plans for dealing with increased numbers at the border, which include building more emergency housing and enlisting more personnel, he said.
Documents released through an access-to-information request by Global News suggest the CBSA believes numbers may go up again, with Hondurans, Salvadorans and Haitians, who until recently had temporary protected status in the U.S., leading the next wave.
And as the number of irregular crossings has gone up over the last two years so too have the numbers of adults — and minors — detained in Quebec.
At the Laval immigration detention centre, there is a women’s wing, a men’s wing, and a family wing, where mothers and children can stay together if the parent so chooses. Otherwise, the children can go into foster care. Fathers can eat and spend time with their wives and children, said Paul Clarke, the executive director of Action Refugiés Montréal, which conducts regular visits of the centre in Laval.
There are still too many children being detained in Canada, Clarke and other advocates say, especially in Quebec, where from April to June last year there were 35 minors held in detention with their parents for an average of more than 30 days. During the same period, six minors were held in the Greater Toronto Area for an average of about 15 days. There were two unaccompanied minors in the country and they were held for one day. But detaining children is a last resort in Canada, Clarke said.
Refugee advocates calling on the Canadian government to rescind the STCA recognize it is on a different scale here than in the U.S., where it’s getting worse.
The practice of routinely detaining children with their parents was already worrisome under Barack Obama. The legal challenge of the STCA criticizes the increasing use of “family detention” as deterrence starting in 2014. By 2015, the Department of Homeland Security had 3,300 cribs and beds for mothers and their children in detention.
But in January 2017, Trump called for expanding immigration detention and terminating the practice known as “catch and release,” so that refugee claimants remained in detention until a final decision was made on their status.
Then came the recent decision to systematically separate children from parents.
Last Friday, a flight attendant recounted how 16 refugee children, dressed in black and grey sweatsuits, were taken on a red-eye flight from Arizona to Florida without their mothers or fathers.
For Clarke, the current situation has shades of the Holocaust and the separation of parents and children as they got off trains at concentration camps. He believes Trump’s separation policy may prove to be the defining moment after which Canadians no longer accept the Safe Third Country agreement.
“Will this be the moment when Canadian society says it isn’t safe for refugees in the U.S., that we can’t put up with this anymore?”