Pushing Status for All as Ottawa
Ramps up Deportations
By Matthew Behrens
When
Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino announced
last week a possible “one-time” pathway to permanent residence for some non-status
workers on the frontlines of Covid-19, Ottawa Roma refugee, seamstress, and
mother of five, Celina Urbanowicz, was seated at her sewing machine, churning
out hand-sewn masks.
Since
the beginning of the pandemic, Urbanowicz has produced for free countless
thousands of the masks for hospitals, daycares, and long-term care homes that
have never had enough personal protective equipment. The masks became so
popular that health care workers earlier this summer took to social media, both
trying to ascertain the identity of this secret angel supplying them with
colourful and well-fitting masks, and hoping to order more.
As
rallies across the land this past weekend pointed
out, Mendicino’s offer, while
welcome, did not go far enough. Indeed, Urbanowicz, a 23-year resident of
Canada who has lived here without status because of legal errors and other
barriers that were the fault of others, will not have the doorway opened to
her. Instead, she is fighting
deportation to the virulently right-wing atmosphere in Poland, where Amnesty
International has concluded a woman of her profile faces "multiple risks on account of their intersectional
vulnerabilities stemming from their identity as a Roma woman, wife of a Muslim
man, and as the mother of a lesbian woman.”
Indeed,
the newly re-elected Polish President Andrzej Duda and his right-wing Law and
Justice party have stoked a neofascist movement that has led to the declaration
of LGBTQ-free zones throughout the country, pulling out of the Istanbul Convention on ending violence against women, and an increase in anti-Roma
violence.
Urbanowicz’s
case is not isolated. She is one of hundreds of thousands of non-status people
who live in the shadows of this country, subjected to economic exploitation (especially
as migrant farm workers) and often denied the safety and services others enjoy.
While Canada recently announced plans to welcome up to 390,000 immigrants annually by 2022, it
continues to pursue an intensely cruel policy of surveillance, detention, and
deportation of a significant population who pay taxes, contribute to their
communities, and have built lives here.
Status For All
If
Canada’s immigration bureaucrats were to work in a logical fashion, they would
realize that the first cohort of hundreds of thousands of potential permanent
residents are already here and, in many cases, have been for years. Why spend
hundreds of millions annually forcing communities to live in fear, trying to
break up families via detention and deportation (often over the kinds of minor
procedural errors and systemic issues that are rife throughout the system) when
they can grant permanent resident status to everyone now? There is zero
evidence that any harm would result from such a blanket offer to come from the
shadows; if anything, it would prevent the harm that comes with terrorizing and
breaking up families and returning them to persecution.
Mendicino’s
Covid-themed offer is problematic on a number of other levels. It was couched in the
framework of racist Canadian benevolence that fails to acknowledge that humans
caring for one another is a universal trait: “And despite the fact that they
themselves were very vulnerable, (they) put themselves at a high risk to help
others in their community,” he said. “Even though they don’t possess Canadian
papers that give them permanent resident status or immigration status, they
demonstrated a uniquely Canadian quality by looking out for one other.”
The idea
that those who have lived lives at risk and undergone often difficult,
traumatic journeys to get here as refugees should have to undertake additional
risk to win the favour of the Immigration Minister speaks to the heartlessness
at the core of the system. Indeed, in a statement that makes Mendicino eligible
for the Gaslighter of the Year award, he told the Toronto Star: “What
makes this group so unique and so special is the adversity that they had
overcome just to get here.”
But everyone
who comes here faces that adversity, both in the journey and, all too often, in
the struggle to survive here, with only a patchwork of services and advocates
available to help them navigate the system. And the fact that only certain
“designated” occupations fit this bill is yet another discriminatory measure.
Hady Anne, an asylum seeker from Mauritius and member of Solidarité Sans
Frontières, told
the Toronto Star: “It’s saying there
are people who are ‘essential’ and there are others that aren’t,” noting that
the measure does not include undocumented residents, agricultural workers,
international students and refugees working as janitors and in other jobs in
long-term-care facilities. “It’s a
discriminatory measure that brings us backwards in the defence of human
rights.”
Refugees as Inventory Items
Mendicino’s
surface-only benevolence reflects a deeper problem: those who have come to
Canada seeking safety and a better life are rarely viewed by government
bureaucracies as human beings. Rather, they are inventory items that need to be
shuffled from one file to another. This was made pretty clear in the Auditor
General’s (AG) July, 2020 investigation of the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) which, like the
brutal American ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the focus of an
excellent Netflix documentary, Immigration Nation), acts as a kind of Gestapo that hunts vulnerable people in an
effort to meet deportation quotas.
In
2018/19 fiscal, the CBSA spent $34 million to rip apart families and execute
deportations. The AG describes the majority of those found inadmissible to
Canada as “failed asylum claimants,” along with a smaller number of visitors
who overstay their visas or those with alleged criminality. The latter is a
grossly broad term that fails to account for the racial profiling and
over-policing of racialized communities that underscores the policing/judicial
system. It is also minuscule, 2,800 cases, or less than 1.5% of the total. Those
individuals on the list face double punishment, as most have already served
either time or probation for their alleged offences.
Meanwhile,
CBSA tries to deport individuals within a year of a final negative decision,
largely because if individuals manage to stay here longer than 365 days, they
may access a pre-removal risk assessment (whose success rate is less than 5%). The
CBSA hopes to increase deportations to at least 10,000 annually, and received an additional $36
million, beginning in 2019/20, to keep up with its mandate of misery and reach
a hoped for 15,500 annual deportations by 2022.
The
AG’s report is written in the cold, actuarial language that removes all humanity,
insisting that deportation “protects the integrity and fairness of Canada’s
immigration system,” even though the system itself is rife with a lack of
integrity and fairness that grows not from those who come here but from racism,
institutional bias, incompetence, and repeated failure to uphold both its domestic and international law commitments. CBSA
also says removal of refugees is “one of the most effective ways to deter those
who might otherwise seek to abuse the system.” In other words, like the Trump
administration, the goal is not to make it safe for those at risk, but rather
to punish those who, for whatever reason, cannot win their cases. Those reasons
often range from an inability to find a translator or competent lawyer, missing
a checkbox on an application form, not having a “you have been tortured”
certificate from the torturers in the country they fled, biased decision makers
at the Immigration and Refugee Board, or submitting a document a day late. They
are deemed “failed” asylum seekers when in fact, they simply could not win
against a system that too often fails them.
The
AG says there are about 50,000 “enforceable cases” in the CBSA inventory, and
bemoans an institutional incompetence that, while perhaps good news for those
trying to survive here without fear of being deported, simply extends the
period of uncertainty and living in the shadows that mark the lives of hundreds
of thousands of people. The CBSA is cited for “poor case management” and failure to complete
annual investigations. It is also taken to task for its sloppiness in
maintaining a “national removal inventory” (language one would associate with
toxic waste, but here it’s meant to describe everyone from women fleeing
abusive men and individuals targeted by governments for their ethnic or
religious heritage or political affiliation to peasant farmers forced off their
land and threatened with death for trying to stop Canadian corporations from
building a dangerous mine or megadam in their home community).
CBSA’S Poor Data Management
As
of April 2019, the CBSA had 197,000 removal orders in its “inventory.” Among
them are 132,500 unenforceable removal orders (individuals awaiting word on
asylum claims and permanent residence applications) and 14,500 “stayed” cases
where deportation is legally prohibited. Under the “enforceable” category,
there were 15,300 “working inventory” individuals who CBSA was “required to
remove,” and 34,700 where individuals with immigration warrants could not be
located. The AG notes the numbers are approximations due to CBSA’s poor
“removal data quality.”
One
might find that CBSA’s incompetence and inability to find thousands of those who
continue seeking safety is a mixed blessing. It means not being immediately returned
to dangerous conditions in their homes countries, but it also forces them to
continue living in the shadows, where there is more risk of exploitation.
CBSA’s inability to work as professionals also has incredibly dangerous
consequences. The AG found 3,200 cases in the working inventory that were
“actionable, meaning they had no known impediment to advancing to removal.
However, because of poor data quality, we found that actionable cases were not
reliably identified – some cases were wrongly flagged as actionable, while many
more cases were actionable (‘no impediments’ but were not flagged.)” In human
terms, what this means is refugees with every right to be here as their case is
being determined had been wrongfully labeled as removable, meaning they could
be picked up, detained, and possibly deported before anyone realizes the huge
error committed. The trauma and potential lethality of such sloppiness is
incalculable. The AG found through sampling that at least 500 cases in the working inventory
were not enforceable; those numbers may in fact be far higher. CBSA ultimately
does not care whether it removes those with a right to be here because its
mandate is to hit its quotas. (Unfortunately, the proroguing of Parliament
meant that proposed legislation to introduce oversight of the CBSA was eliminated and must begin
anew at a future date).
In
the sick evaluation of whether or not such an agency meets its mandate, the AG
noted that while the 2018/19 removal year boasted some 9,500 cases, 2,800 had
been refused entry at the border, which means “the agency removed 6,700 cases
from its working or wanted inventories that fiscal year, making little impact
on their levels.” Notably, CBSA confirmed with the AG that “cases in its wanted
inventory are generally considered a low risk to public safety and are not an
agency priority.” In other words, kids and families who, even though they pose
no risk, are nonetheless a juicy target to meet quotas.
Trudeau and Trump’s Concentration Camps
Who,
exactly, is being turned away by Canada under its various border enforcement
mechanisms? Earlier this month, the Federal Court of Canada released a key decision that summarized ten refugee cases while finding that the
so-called Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) with the USA violated the Charter
of Rights and Freedoms. The Court said it was clear that Canada is actively
turning away individuals seeking asylum here with the full knowledge that those
refugees will be immediately detained upon return to the USA, where standards
for refugee acceptance continue to decline and conditions for those behind bars
are cruel.
Under
the agreement, anyone arriving at a land port of entry (POE) from the U.S.
cannot make a refugee claim in Canada because of the assumption that the US is
“safe” for refugees. Yet, as the Court notes, “claimants arriving from the US
by air, by sea or between land POEs, are
eligible to have their refugee claims” heard.
Among
those who were part of the challenges to the STCA were individuals and families
escaping danger in El Salvador, Syria and Ethiopia. Ms Mustefa, for example,
was turned away after 30 hours of interrogation in Quebec and immediately
jailed for a month, with the first week in solitary confinement.
Mustefa
described solitary as a “terrifying, isolating and psychologically traumatic
experience,” and, as a Muslim, reports she was served pork even though she informed
guards she could not eat it. As a
result, she lost 15 pounds by skipping meals.
A
Syrian family who tried to walk across the border at the Roxham Road opening in
the New York/Quebec border were told by the CBSA they would be arrested if they
tried to enter. When they turned back to New York, they were thrown into
separate police cars, questioned, photographed and fingerprinted, with the
mother forced to remove her hijab. (They were thankfully able to eventually get
temporary resident permits and have since become permanent residents.)
While
Canada has disingenuously argued that it has no control over what happens to
those it deports or kicks back to the US, the Court found that “CBSA officials are involved in the physical
handing over of claimants to US officials. This conduct does not make Canada a
‘passive participant’ and it provides a ‘sufficient connection’ to the
offending conduct. I conclude that the actions of Canadian officials in
returning ineligible STCA claimants to US officials facilitates a process that
results in detention.”
Physical and Psychological
Suffering
The
Court notes that “the accounts of detainees demonstrate both physical and
psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will
not be able to assert asylum claims.” The conditions they are forced to ensure
are brutal, with the court finding “all
describe the detention centres as abnormally cold. J.K. describes being unable
to sleep due to the cold; P.Q. describes asking for extra blankets, but not receiving
any until she had a fever and needed to see a doctor, and R.S. stated that when
prisoners would huddle together for warmth, the guards would pull the blankets
off them. J.K. states that she denied requiring medical attention to avoid
being handcuffed. R.S. describes the medical care in her detention facility as
being inadequate. R.S. observed the nurse in her detention facility ignore
black detainees while going out of her way to address medical issues of white
detainees. She states that the nurse would ‘ignore us and simply not address
our concerns’.”
The
Court’s bottom line was clear: “The
evidence establishes that the conduct of Canadian officials in applying the
provisions of the STCA will provoke certain, and known, reactions by US
officials. In my view, the risk of detention for the sake of ‘administrative’
compliance with the provisions of the STCA cannot be justified. Canada cannot
turn a blind eye to the consequences that befell Ms. Mustefa in its efforts to
adhere to the STCA. The evidence clearly demonstrates that those returned to
the US by Canadian officials are detained as a penalty.”
Such
brutal conditions are wholly consistent with those documented in report after
report, including Human Rights Watch’s In The Freezer: Abusive
Conditions for Women and Children in US Immigration Holding Cells, as well as the excellent Netflix series Immigration Nation, which follows the plight of many of those detained, those
organizing against the American concentration camps, and the casual cruelty of
ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers who, like their CBSA
counterparts, think only in terms of numbers processing and bottom lines.
All
of this is publicly available evidence, and yet Canada continues to behave as
if the US is a safe destination for refugees. Canadian officials are aware of
the fact that, for Salvadorans, being sent back to the US and eventual
deportation back home often results in death. Indeed, more than 70 people deported from the US to
that country under the Obama administration from 2012-15 were murdered upon
their return, numbers that increased under Trump with deteriorating conditions
in that Central American country.
While the Federal Court gave Ottawa a six-month period to bring
its policies in line with the constitution and the law, the Trudeau Liberals
have chosen in favour of the Trump concentration camp system of family
separation and racist border walls, deciding last week to appeal the Court
decision. In an August 21 statement,
Public Safety Minister Bill Blair made himself eligible for the Cognitive
Dissonance Award of 2020 by declaring the appeal was being conducted because “Canada remains firmly committed to upholding a compassionate, fair and
orderly refugee protection system.”
Whether
that commitment will extend to Roma refugee Celina Urbanowicz remains to be
seen. She spent a few hours last week dropping off face masks to grateful
nurses at Riverside Hospital in Ottawa. As she returned home to continue her
one-woman production line, her daughters and supporters continue campaigning to
have her accepted as a permanent resident to Canada and to cancel the
deportation to Poland. This week, they launched a 23-day chain fast, each day marking one year that she and her family have lived here
without status. They are also promoting a petition that has garnered over 7,000 signatures.
The fact
that refugees must risk their lives in a Covid-infected facility or seek the
help of advocates to generate petitions, publicity, demonstrations, and chain
fasts simply to win their basic right to be safe speaks not to a refugee
problem, but to a systemic problem with Canada’s immigration system. As
government officials continue to dismiss their legal obligations to asylum
seekers, it falls to the rest of us to engage in this work to ensure an end to
the cruel warehousing, hunting, and deportation of those who came here because
their backs were against the wall in their home countries. Lives hang in the
balance, and all of us have choices to make.
