Fearing U.S. crackdown, refugees run to B.C.
It was a cold February night and the ground was covered with snow when Juan, Carmen and their 11-year-old son Jose slipped across the U.S. border into British Columbia.
Carmen is seven months pregnant and she dreaded being separated from her children if she was deported from the States, a possibility that had suddenly become very real after the election of Donald Trump. And so, the Honduran family decided to try their luck in Canada, where they had heard the government was more welcoming to refugees.
“We had to run. We ran in danger of being caught,” Carmen said of her arrival in B.C.
The family has been here a week and is seeking legal aid to file a refugee claim. Postmedia News agreed to use only their first names.
Speaking through a translator, the family said they left Honduras because Jose had no future there, except to be forcibly recruited into one of the violent gangs that control much of the country. The family had lost their home when they could no longer afford to pay a “war tax” to the local criminals — they were given just two days to leave or they would be killed.
After a long, dangerous journey through Guatemala and Mexico, they settled in the eastern U.S., where they lived happily for two years — until a new president was elected on a promise of deporting millions of people like them.
The federal Immigration Department couldn’t provide any recent statistics on people seeking asylum after crossing the border on foot, but spokeswoman Nancy Caron wrote in an email that “we have not seen a surge in the number of in-land refugee claims in the past few months.”
Refugee advocates in Metro Vancouver say otherwise. Although the numbers in B.C. don’t compare to the hundreds of asylum seekers who have braved the bitter cold at the border near Emerson, Man., in recent weeks, anecdotal evidence suggests an increase here as well.
Sanctuary Health’s Byron Cruz, who works with undocumented migrants, said his organization knows of five or six groups that have walked across the border in the past two weeks.
But after finding and crossing an isolated stretch of the 8,890-km border into Canada, their fear of deportation may not fade. Cruz wants to warn people living in the U.S. not to make any rash decisions about coming north.
“Our message to people in sanctuary cities in the States is that you are probably better off there,” he said.
Undocumented migrants often seek one Canada’s three sanctuary cities. Toronto, Hamilton and London have adopted policies intended to protect them from deportation and allow them to access municipal services.
Vancouver stopped short of becoming a sanctuary city, instead introducing an “access without fear” policy last April.
The policy applies only to services provided by the city, and not to civic services provided by police, parks and libraries, which are governed by individual boards, or agencies of other governments active in the city.
In Canada, “sanctuary city” has a much different meaning than in the U.S., said Harsha Walia, an organizer with No One Is Illegal. In a majority of U.S. sanctuary cities, local police don’t collaborate with immigration officials (it’s not clear whether Vancouver police will). U.S. sanctuary cities also guarantee access to a much wider range of public services, she added.
“I think that difference is vital. I think there will be more sanctuary cities [in Canada], but the fear is that they will be much more symbolic than meaningful,” she said.
Walia said her organization has also seen an increase in people crossing into Canada “irregularly,” including four last week.
“People expected that they could declare themselves and receive asylum in Canada right away,” she said. “And so almost everybody was like, ‘Where can I go to get my papers?’ ”