Canada case poses question: Is U.S. immigration system safe?

CHAMPLAIN, N.Y. — 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 restrictive 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 U.S.

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 legal case being heard in Toronto federal court this week is challenging that 2002 U.S.-Canadian agreement, which the Trump administration has sought to replicate to stem the flow of migrants at the United States’ southern border, striking similar pacts with the governments of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

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 because of the Trump administration’s “full-out assault on the rights of refugee claimants and refugees,” said Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, one of the groups bringing the case.

The legal challenge cites the widespread detention of asylumseekers who are turned back from Canada and the separation of parents and children as other examples of why the U.S. is not a “safe” country for newly arrived immigrants.

“At this moment the U.S. asylum system is on trial in Canada,” Neve said.

The Trump administration crafted a similar policy to keep Central American and other immigrants from coming to the U.S. by signing pacts with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras earlier this year. Critics of the Trump policies contend that the Central American countries are unsafe for asylum seekers in their own ways because they have some of the highest murder rates in the world.

According to Canadian government statistics, since early 2017 through June nearly 50,000 people have applied for asylum after crossing into the country illegally. Most of those irregular bordercrossers entered Canada at Roxham Road.

Activist Janet McFetridge has met the asylum-seekers at the New York border before they enter Canada. On Monday, she gave the two Nigerian children scarves to help ward off the looming winter.

“It hasn’t really changed in that it’s always people who are looking for a better life and they are fleeing something, whether it be some sort of fear or persecution or religious freedom or economic opportunity,” she said. “They are coming to find something where they can be safe and healthy.”