A Challenge to Canada’s Official Policy That the U.S. Is Safe for Migrants
My colleagues Julie Turkewitz, Tibisay Romero, Sheyla Urdaneta and Isayen Herrera interviewed 40 Venezuelan men who had been shipped from the United States to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador as part of a Trump administration program to send migrants to third countries.
The resulting article is an often harrowing read. The men said that they had been beaten and sexually assaulted by guards, and some of them were driven to attempt suicide. [Read: ‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran Prison] In July, along with about 160 other Venezuelans, the men were released in a larger diplomatic settlement that led to the release of 10 Americans and U.S. residents who had been held in Venezuela.
Those men are not the only people who have been deported from the United States without due process. People continue to be rounded up on streets by masked U.S. federal agents across the country. And migrants, with exceptions like white Afrikaners from South Africa, are now generally blocked from making asylum claims at the U.S. border. Given all that, Lloyd Axworthy, a former Liberal immigration and foreign minister who retired this week as chairman of the World Refugee & Migration Council, said that it was now time for Canada to act. Specifically, he wants the federal government to stop turning back asylum seekers who try to enter Canada from the United States under the safe third country agreement. As its name suggests, the pact justifies the rebuffing of asylum seekers on the basis that they will not face persecution after they are returned to the United States. “As virtually each day goes by, I think the suppression of asylum rights and asylum seekers in the United States grows worse,” Mr. Axworthy told me. “And yet we’re claiming that this is a safe place to go.” He continued: “The more we continue, I think the more we become complicit in the kind of illegalities that the Trump administration is engaging in and, as a result, contribute to that larger view that somehow asylum seekers or refugees are dangerous, risky people.” The agreement languished in relative obscurity until the first Trump administration, when a growing swell of asylum seekers began using a loophole in the agreement to make claims in Canada after entering from the United States. Under the agreement’s original terms, only people who had entered Canada at official border crossings could be turned back. As their numbers rose, some provinces, particularly Quebec, became overwhelmed.
Under Justin Trudeau, the prime minister at the time, Canada was able to amend the agreement in 2023 to shut down irregular crossings like Roxham Road, which straddles the border between Quebec and New York State. Mr. Axworthy’s call to end the agreement comes when polls suggest Canadians’ attitudes toward admitting outsiders have shifted considerably since 2016, when Mr. Trudeau proclaimed on social media that Canada’s doors were open. That came after President Trump had signed an executive order limiting immigration. “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith,” Mr. Trudeau wrote. “Diversity is our strength.” Partly as a result of the shift in public opinion on immigration as well as a response to Mr. Trump’s inaccurate claims that large numbers of migrants were entering the United States from Canada, the new government under Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced a border bill last month that further limits the ability of people to make asylum claims. His government has also moved to reduce overall immigration levels. While Mr. Axworthy laments the shift in public sentiment, he attributes it to the Trudeau government’s greatly expanded acceptance of immigrants, both permanent and temporary, as a way to build up the economy. “They doubled up on the immigration standards and quotas, but they didn’t do anything to make sure that the support systems were there — education, health, housing,” he said. “So refugees became the scapegoat for why these things are in shortage and why people can’t get access. And it’s given rise to some pretty ugly stuff emerging in this country.” Trans Canada
Ian Austen reports on Canada for The Times. A Windsor, Ontario, native now based in Ottawa, he has reported on the country for two decades. He can be reached at austen@nytimes.com. How are we doing? Like this email?
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