The Star’s view:

Stand up to needless fear,

There’s a chill along the border between Canada and the United States, and it has nothing to do with the weather. Fallout from the Trump administration’s crackdown on asylum-seekers and its travel ban on people from half a dozen Muslim countries risks making crossing the border more difficult and certainly more worrisome for many Canadians.

The Trudeau government needs to make clear to Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, John Kelly, the importance of easy crossborder travel when he visits Ottawa this week.

And it should encourage Americans, especially those in neighbouring states that also value good cross-border relations, to speak out against the Trump administration’s misguided policies that are throwing unnecessary roadblocks in the way of Canadians trying to travel south.

One of the most troubling developments is an emerging pattern of Canadians being denied entry to the United States for no apparent reason other than their ethnic background.

So far about half a dozen cases have become public — a tiny number among the tens of thousands of Canadians who cross the border on an average day. But they raise questions about whether U.S. border agents have taken Trump’s aggressive language toward outsiders (and especially Muslims) as permission to get tough on anyone with brown skin.

The cases include that of Yassine Aber, a Canadian-born Montrealer of Moroccan origin who was questioned for five hours and then turned back at the Quebec-Vermont border when he tried to cross with his university track team. Another Montrealer, Fadwa Alaoui, said she was quizzed about her religion and views on Trump before being turned away at the border. She is also a Canadian citizen with a valid passport.

And this week, another Canadian-born Montrealer, Manpreet Kooner, reported she was denied entry to Vermont. Of Indian origin, she was using a Canadian passport but was told she needed a visa and wonders why the two white friends she was travelling with had no border problems.

There’s nothing in Trump’s immigration policies that should cause problems for her or the others who were stopped. But it’s no stretch to ask if they were effectively profiled by border guards emboldened by Trump’s incendiary language to single out some Canadians only because of their race or religion. Indeed, Kooner says she was told by a U.S. border agent: “I know you might feel like you’re being Trumped.”

Incidents like this — even if they are few and random — send an ominous message to millions of Canadians. The government should make clear to Kelly that although the U.S. has the right to control its own border, it is unacceptable for it to allow its officials to discriminate simply on the basis of ethnic or religious background.

Trump’s revised travel ban, issued on Monday, raises a host of questions as well. He’s scaled it back a bit and put in a number of exemptions to make it less objectionable than his first effort from a legal point of view. But the new version raises the possibility that permanent residents of Canada may be denied entry to the U.S.

The new order specifies that Canadian permanent residents from any of the six countries subject to the 90-day travel ban must apply for a waiver that “may” be granted on a “case-by-case” basis. That’s worrisomely vague and the government must urgently seek clarification from U.S. authorities on how this will be interpreted and applied.

There’s only so much the Canadian government can do in the face of Trump’s fear-mongering. But it can make clear to American authorities that the U.S. will be shooting itself in the foot if it turns the border from a model of international co-operation into a place of needless fear for too many Canadians.

The government should make clear to Kelly that while the U.S. has the right to control its own border, it is unacceptable for it to allow its officials to discriminate simply on the basis of ethnic or religious background