Deportation of refugee would be another hostility
The Liberal government has repeatedly said, “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.” What about the children who never even got a chance?
Abdoul Abdi’s situation is one that dozens of people find themselves in. They fall through the cracks of the various systems that do not work in the interests of Black, racialized and poor people.
Abdi arrived in Nova Scotia in mid-2000 with his sister and two aunts. The family was granted permanent residency under a sponsored refugee program. Within a year of arriving, he and his sister were apprehended by children’s services. By the age of 9, he had become a permanent ward of the state.
Abdi was never adopted. Instead, he had, according to his lawyer, 20 different placements over the years. In one foster home, he lived with a foster family that he considered abusive.
“Around this time, he starts to have conflicts with the law as many children in care do,” said Benjamin Perryman, who is representing Abdi.
At the National Black Canadian Summit in Toronto, activists presented Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Ahmed Hussen with a letter about the case.
It read: “The Minister could issue a warning letter to Abdoul, but instead continues to seek deportation, even though this would violate Canada’s international human rights obligations.”
Children of African descent are overrepresented in the child welfare system. In Toronto, for example, Black children represent 40.8 per cent of children in care despite representing only 8.5 per cent of the Toronto population. The apprehension of Black children is both a present problem and a relic of the past.
The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children operated for the early part of the 20th century. Black children were placed in it because other public institutions would not take them. There they faced horrific abuses resulting in an apology, a settlement and an inquiry. A preliminary report from that inquiry states that African Nova Scotian children remain vastly overrepresented in the child welfare system.
This overrepresentation further harms children, such as Abdi, who arrived as non-citizens.
“In so many cases, people did not know they weren’t citizens because they’ve been here since they were children or didn’t know they could be removed to a country they didn’t know at all,” said Julie Chamagne, executive director of the Halifax Refugee Clinic.
“Until recently, children could not apply for citizenship of their own,” Perryman said, “so when Abdoul became a ward of the state, he could not do that. For reasons that are unclear, children’s services did not do that.”
Through a freedom of information request, Perryman discovered that Nova Scotia children’s services does not have a policy for non-citizen children in their care.
In Abdi’s case, not only was his application never made, but the child welfare system in Nova Scotia actively prevented his aunts from applying for him because they no longer had guardianship.
Says Perryman, “If he had become a citizen, he wouldn’t be at the risk he faces today.”
Underserved by the state, Abdi, like many children who are taken into care, has lived a precarious life; at one point, he was homeless. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, assaulting a police officer with a car, theft of a motor vehicle and dangerous driving, and is currently serving a four-year sentence.
No reasonable person makes excuses for his criminal actions. Instead, it is essential to understand the conditions that led him up to them.
The child welfare system separated him from his family, deprived him of a stable home and subjected him to abuse in at least one of the 20 homes he lived in. Where he sits now — in a medium-security prison, fearing deportation back to a country he has never known — is the result of an institutional cruelty that non-citizen children face, and that repeatedly criminalizes Black youth.
The intersections of anti-Blackness, hostility to migrants and the criminalization of Black, especially Somali, youth is now meeting one more: the unthinking, unfeeling bureaucracy of our immigration system.
The power to grant a warning letter resides with Ralph Goodale, the minister for public safety. Should he want to understand the factors that shaped Abdi’s life, Goodale would issue the letter, allowing Abdi to stay in the country by preventing his case from going before the Immigration Appeal Division, which would automatically seek his removal on the basis of criminal inadmissibility.
Abdoul Abdi is a young man living out the consequence of a system that didn’t care about him and is ready to punish him for its cruelty.
Where Abdoul Abdi sits now is the result of an institutional cruelty that non-citizen children face
Vicky Mochama is a co-host of the podcast Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a triweekly column for Metro News that mixes politics, news and humour.