Time for Canada to step away from Donald Trump’s assault on refugee rights
by Alex Neve, Secretary General, Amnesty International Canada
One week in late October, I travelled along the US/Mexico border with a delegation made up of Amnesty leaders from six countries around the world – the United States, Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece and Kenya. As we moved back and forth across the border we witnessed and heard first hand of the Trump Administration’s deepening assault on the rights of refugees and migrants.
Soon after my return to Canada I sat in Federal Court in Toronto as a hard-working legal team representing Amnesty International, the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Council of Churches and eight refugee claimants from El Salvador, Syria and Ethiopia began five days of hearings as part of our legal challenge seeking to overturn the designation of the United States as a “safe” country for refugees through the Canada/US Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).
Two very different stories about refugee protection playing out on the United States’ southern and northern borders. The unrelenting human rights violations along the US/Mexico border have provoked a human rights and humanitarian crisis that deepens with every presidential tweet or Executive Order. The words that most readily come to mind include cruel, punitive and illegal.
However, along the northern border the Canadian government deliberately ignores that harrowing reality and holds to a disgraceful fiction, rooted in the Safe Third Country Agreement, that all is good for refugees in the United States. Whether it was true that the US was safe for refugees when the agreement came into force in 2004, it undeniably is not the case in 2019. But the Trudeau government has steadfastly refused to budge from that position.
Under the STCA, refugees who pass through the United States before coming to an official Canadian land border post to make a refugee claim for instance at the Peace Bridge at Niagara Falls, are turned back into the United States and forced to pursue an asylum claim there instead; all based on Canada’s assertion that the US upholds refugee rights.
Not surprisingly, in the nearly 3 years since Donald Trump’s inauguration, there are very many refugee claimants who know well and have even personally experienced how “unsafe” the US is for refugees. With official Canadian border posts closed to them, they have turned instead to crossing the border irregularly, making refugee claims once they are inside Canada (sometimes only a few metres in, such as what we have seen at Roxham Road, Quebec). Close to 50,000 refugee claimants have crossed into Canada this way over the past three years.
While some politicians and commentators have breathlessly fueled a xenophobic narrative that the border is out of control and an invasion of illegal migrants is underway, nothing could be further than the truth. First there is nothing illegal about crossing a border irregularly in order to seek refugee protection. That is in fact a right that is recognized and protected in both Canadian and international law. And the numbers are hardly even remotely close to crisis proportions. I spent time in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh earlier this year, a country that received an influx of 750,000 refugees in just three months in late 2017. The Bangladeshi government would likely have a very different take on claims that Canada has faced a crisis.
Sadly, though, it has had some impact on public opinion and shifted the mood notably away from the national enthusiasm for Syrian resettlement in 2016 to the 2019 suspicion that the illegals are coming.
There are several reasons why it is so important that the STCA be overturned.
First, refugee claimants have made and will inevitably continue to make dangerous border crossings to avoid the STCA. We know of cases of people who have lost fingers and toes to frostbite and of at least one woman who died of exposure, just before she reached the Canadian border.
Second, if the agreement was lifted, irregular border crossings would diminish dramatically. Refugee claimants would present themselves at official border posts and be processed through regular channels. The fodder for xenophobic misinformation would disappear.
There is a third reason why it is so important to suspend the STCA. And it was on my mind constantly as our Amnesty International delegation travelled along the US/Mexico border. In the face of a grim and worsening human rights crisis at that border, at a time that Canada has an important role and responsibility to speak out and urge the Trump Administration to relent, we are instead shamefully and entirely silent. Of course, we are, because we are sticking to the position, dictated by the STCA, that the US is safe, and that asylum seekers and refugees do not face rights violations in the United States.
So, Canada did not speak out in 2018 when babies and young children who had crossed the border irregularly with their families were forcibly separated from their parents and locked up in horrifying detention centres.
Canada did not speak out earlier this year when the tauntingly-misnamed Migrant Protection Protocols were enacted, forcing asylum-seekers to “remain in Mexico” while their cases are processed in the United States. That can stretch on indefinitely and has become a staggering strain on migrant shelters in Mexico, faced with an influx they had not anticipated.
Canada has not spoken out about the makeshift refugee camp I toured in Matamoros, Mexico across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. 2,000 asylum-seekers (and growing) shelter in deplorable conditions, living in donated camping tents at the end of the bridge across which lies the prospect of safety.
And in all Mexican border communities, criminal cartels have quickly realized that asylum-seekers in such precarious conditions are easy prey to threats, violence and extortion. Canada’s response? Silence.
The tales of cruelty and illegality know no bounds. Pregnant women are supposed to be exempt from return to Mexico under these Protocols but have regularly been sent back. In one particularly egregious instance a woman was given an injection to stop her contractions so she could be returned.
Mexican asylum-seekers, including families who have fled from an Indigenous community in the southern state of Chiapas, are kept waiting in Mexico, often for many weeks, through a process known as “metering”, under which only a handful of claims are registered by U.S. officials on any given day. It is a blatant violation of international law to force asylum-seekers to remain in the very country in which they fear persecution.
Asylum-seekers are now being brought into courts set up in tents right at the border, where hundreds of cases are heard per day. These dehumanizing group hearings are conducted by video-link, with judges, government officials and translators located elsewhere, able to push a mute button at any time.
I could fill pages with the injustices and the suffering we witnessed.
And Canada stays silent. Which we cannot accept.
In Brownsville I met an immigration lawyer who had moved there, practically overnight, from Washington DC, and is now volunteering in any way she can to help alleviate the injustice unleashed over these past three years. She framed the challenge profoundly. This is one of those moments, one of those times in history, she said. You either show up or you prepare to face your conscience.
That is what is at stake for Canada as well.
As long as we continue to maintain the Safe Third Country Agreement, we are giving a nod and a wink to Donald Trump and are complicit in his cruel campaign against refugees and migrants.
It is time for us to show up. Time to make it clear that we are on the side of human rights and refugee protection.
That means scrapping the STCA. The government can tough it out and wait for a Federal Court ruling. Or they can put the country’s conscience first and do the right thing and do it right now.
