Province must stop housing immigration detainees

As dozens of migrants continue a hunger strike inside a provincial jail in Lindsay, Ont., the federal minister responsible for their welfare keeps stalling for time.

Ralph Goodale, the minister of Public Safety, says he is concerned about the indefinite detention of undocumented migrants, who are being jailed across the country not because of criminal charges, but because they lack full status as citizens. Goodale expects the public to wait until the fall for his proposed solutions.

That’s not good enough. The hungerstriking detainees are refusing to eat to show the desperation and cruelty of their situation. They need help now. If Goodale cannot or will not act immediately, the provincial government under Premier Kathleen Wynne should. After all, a third of immigration detainees are kept in provincial jails like the one in Lindsay. Wynne must refuse to keep any new immigration detainees in a provincial jail and set free those who are already there.

Abdurahman Ibrahim Hassan, a migrant whom officials were trying to deport to Somalia, died in police custody in June of 2015. Hassan didn’t die in a provincial jail, but his story illustrates the need to stop criminalizing people without status. Hassan took his last breath, at the age of 39, in a hospital bed, while being restrained by two police officers. One officer held his arm, while the other pinned his head to the bed with a towel.

Last week, the Special Investigations Unit determined that the two Peterborough police officers should not be charged in Hassan’s death. As it has done in the past with other controversial deaths involving police, the SIU publicized its findings on a Friday evening. The agency did not even name Hassan in its press release.

While the exact cause of Hassan’s death matters, it is an insult to his life to stop there. He was detained in Lindsay’s maximum security jail for more than three years leading up to his death. According to his friends and advocates, Hassan, a refugee whose family fled to Canada in 1993, suffered from diabetes, sleep apnea, and took medication for a number of psychological issues. His time in jail undoubtedly affected his physical and mental health.

Beyond that, the only reason two officers were present in Hassan’s room at Peterborough Regional Health Centre was because he had no status, and the Canadian Border Services Agency feared he would run away. While it is terrible to imagine that Hassan died while being physically restrained by police, the prison walls that separate migrants from their families and friends every day in Ontario are equally inhumane.

Ontario’s government doesn’t decide which migrants are detained, but it bears significant responsibility for their wellbeing in provincial jails. That same government is also responsible when detainees’ poor health causes them to be hospitalized, as Hassan was. And when a migrant dies in the custody of police who shouldn’t have been guarding him, as Hassan did, the provincial SIU must investigate and report to the provincial ministry of the Attorney General.

In other words, provinces are forced to do CBSA’s dirty work and to administer indefinite torment to people who should not be in jail. The United Nations standard for detention of an undocumented person is 90 days. The Conservatives ignored this guideline during their decade in power, as did the Liberals before them. A refusal from Wynne and other premiers to assist with detentions would force Ottawa to create humane alternatives to indefinite migrant detention in maximum security jails.

There is another provincial ministry involved in Hassan’s treatment. The provincial coroner, whose office is part of the ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, has agreed to investigate the cause of his death and to prevent similar deaths in the future.

But the coroner’s office is overwhelmed and under-resourced, and has warned it may not be able to investigate Hassan’s case until 2018.

We don’t need to wait that long to propose that Hassan might still be alive today if he had never been detained in a provincial jail.

Goodale clearly isn’t getting the message. His office issued a statement this week that expressed concern for detained migrants’ physical and mental well-being, but said nothing about the issue of indefinite detention. This, as hunger-striking detainees in Lindsay put their own lives at risk to demand justice. If Goodale won’t listen to detainees, perhaps a strong stance by the province that jails most undocumented migrants will move him.