Case challenges U.S.-Canada border accord

Rights groups file suit over safe immigration

TORONTO — In the looming darkness, the Nigerian family of four, including two children carrying stuffed animals and a violin case, climbed out of a taxi at the end of a dead-end road in upstate New York as Canadian law enforcement officers watched a short distance away, across a ditch that marks the international boundary.

“This is an illegal point of entry, OK? If you cross here you are going to be arrested,” a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer said.

“Yeah,” muttered the man, who wouldn’t give his name, before he and his family dragged their belongings across the border and were led to a hastily built structure where asylum seekers are processed.

Tens of thousands have made the same northbound trek since early 2017, when people who despaired of finding a permanent safe haven in the United States under new Trump administration policies began turning to Canada for help.

Over a six-hour span on Monday, this family, another group from

Nigeria, a man from Syria, another from Haiti and a family who wouldn’t say where they were from all crossed at the same illegal entry point at Roxham Road, about 30 miles south of Montreal.

These migrants know that a long-standing agreement between the United States and Canada requires those seeking asylum to apply in the first country they arrive in. So, if they crossed from the U.S. at a legal Canadian port of entry, they would be returned and told to apply in the United States.

But if they request asylum on Canadian soil at a location other than an official crossing, the process is allowed to go forward. In most cases, the refugees are released and allowed to live in Canada, taking advantage of generous social welfare benefits while their asylum applications are reviewed — a process that can take years.

Now a case being heard in Toronto federal court is challenging that 2002 U.S.-Canadian agreement.

Three human rights groups have filed the case calling on Canada to withdraw from the U.S.-Canadian agreement, arguing that the Canadian government has no guarantee that immigrants returned to the United States will be safe.

Marie-Emmanuelle Cadieux, a spokeswoman for Canada’s border security minister, Bill Blair, wouldn’t comment on the specifics of the case, but said the government constantly monitors developments in the U.S. and Canada, and is continuing to work with the U.S. on ways to strengthen the agreement.

“The United States remains a country with an extensive system for processing applications that remain subject to administrative and legal checks and balances,” Cadieux told The Associated Press. “Any and all changes are considered in the context of the asylum system as a whole.”

U.S. government officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Wilson Ring The Associated Press A family from Nigeria waits Monday in Champlain, N.Y., to illegally cross the U.S. border into Canada, where Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers wait.