TRUMP REFUGEES
FLEEING TO VANCOUVER
Antonio Mejia travelled more than 7,500 kilometres to get to Vancouver. By train, by bus, and some of it on foot. For one stretch, he waded through water, across the Rio Grande under the cover of night.
“I worked for the police department, in El Salvador,” Mejia began, recounting his journey in an interview with the Georgia Straight.
Many years ago, in 1999, he sent a member of the notorious MS-13 gang to prison. When that man was released in 2009, he wanted payback, Mejia said.
In the years in between, he had gotten married and fathered two children. He had no desire to go a second round with MS-13. Mejia left the police force and his family relocated from Soyapango, a suburb east of the capital of San Salvador, to Santa Tecla, on its far west.
The death threats ceased. But one day the gang came for his eldest son.
“Now the banditos were trying to recruit my kid,” Mejia said.
“We’re all going to leave,” he told his wife.
In 2015, the couple and their children fled El Salvador for Guatemala. Mejia continued north, to look for work in America. For two years, he found odd jobs, first in Texas and then California, trying to establish a new life in the United States. Then came November 8, 2016.
“When Trump won, everything changed,” Mejia said, interviewed with the assistance of a translator.
“There was no way I was ever going to get legal status there,” he explained. “There was never going to be a fair decision. So I began to prepare everything to leave.”
Mejia is part of a wave of Latin American people who are fleeing the United States for Canada. During the first 10 months of 2017, the RCMP intercepted roughly 17,000 immigrants who crossed the border on foot. That compares to 2,486 interceptions the previous year, according to data supplied by the federal police force.
The vast majority of that activity has been in Quebec. There, the influx occurred so fast that in August, Montreal’s Olympic Stadium was converted into a temporary shelter and people were forced to sleep there on cots. But B.C. has also experienced a sharp increase in refugee claims.
According to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), from 2011 to 2016 there were an average of 142 asylum claims filed annually at B.C. land ports. Then, during the first 10 months of 2017, there were 275.
A different set of statistics—national figures compiled by IRCC— details where these people are coming from. It shows that asylum claims from several Latin American countries have skyrocketed over just the last year.
From 2016 to 2017, asylum claims where the individual alleged persecution in Mejia’s home country of El Salvador jumped 208 percent, to a projected 752 (based on the year’s first nine months of data).
From Mexico, they rose 394 percent, to 1,235.
And yet those jumps are nothing compared to that of Haiti.
From 2016 to 2017, asylum claims for the impoverished Caribbean nation leapt from 631 to a projected 8,332—an increase of 1,220 percent.
Finally, refugee claims where a person alleged persecution in the United States have also risen sharply, by 574 percent this year, from 129 in 2016 to a projected 869 in 2017.
A major factor behind these increases is Donald Trump.
Since an earthquake devastated much of Haiti in 2010, some 59,000 Haitians have resided legally in America under a designation called temporary protected status (TPS). Through 2017, there grew increasing speculation that the Trump administration would cease renewing those people’s legal papers. Then, on November 20, fears were confirmed.
“The Trump administration has given nearly 60,000 Haitians with provisional legal residency in the United States 18 months to leave,” reads a report in the Washington Post.
In addition to Haiti, there are similar TPS classifications for people living in the U.S. who are originally from Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. If the Trump administration decides to end those arrangements as well, the number of people forced to leave America would number more than 400,000.
How many might head north is anybody’s guess.
ON JUNE 16, 2015, a developer turned reality-television star see next page