‘A cat-and-mouse game of epic proportions’: What Trump’s mass deportations and immigration enforcement mean to Canada

Will see extent to which this affects asylum claimants through monthly statistics…

In 2023, during the Biden administration, Canada and the U.S. updated the Safe Third Country Agreement to essentially ban anyone crossing anywhere along the land border from making asylum claims in the other country. The initial ban had applied only at the official ports of entry and prompted irregular migrants to sneak through unguarded entry points such as Roxham Road in Quebec.

Despite the expanded asylum ban and Ottawa’s new border surveillance and enforcement effort to appease Trump — who has threatened crippling tariffs on Canadian goods — desperate migrants won’t be deterred because they are not going to return to the Global South, said immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges.

The removal of legal pathways for migrants to seek protection in the U.S. — suspending the refugee resettlement program and shutting down the app for migrants to make an appointment to legally enter the U.S. for asylum — won’t help, she noted.

“This is going to feed human smugglers and it’s going to make people take risks,” said Desloges. “More people are going to die when attempting these crossings.”

While it’s yet to be seen whether the White House can secure the funding to build 100,000 additional detention beds and how it will boost enforcement, refugee lawyer Adam Sadinsky said Trump’s rhetoric about the planned raids in major metropolitan areas and holding migrants in jail for the maximum time is enough to instil fear among migrants in the U.S.

“All of this language is used to make America look as inhospitable to refugees as possible,” said Sadinsky, a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers.

“Our government is maybe falling into the same sort of rhetoric that refugees are a burden and a problem and something we need to protect against rather than a population that we need to protect.”

There’s a provision in the revised Safe Third Country Agreement that allows irregular migrants to seek asylum in Canada or the U.S. if they managed to cross an unguarded land border and remain undetected for 14 days — a clause that Ottawa is said to want to remove from the deal, to tighten asylum eligibility and reduce refugee backlogs.

However, critics said it’s not a real solution because it would simply move the backlog from the refugee board to the Immigration Department, which would be required to assess if potential deportees are safe to be sent back to their country of origin or to the U.S. However, Ottawa announced just this week it will cut 3,300 immigration staff.

“We are going to see a cat-and-mouse game of epic proportions between asylum seekers trying to sneak in and border agents trying to keep them out,” said refugee lawyer Max Berger. “If scrapped, it will not deter asylum seekers from sneaking to avoid deportation from the U.S. … but just drive them further underground.”

On Tuesday, Public Safety Minister David McGuinty said that so far, Canada hasn’t seen any increase in the number of irregular migrants, but officials are monitoring it closely. He also cautioned that anyone considering crossing Canada’s border illegally would be putting themselves at risk.

“One of the messages we’re imparting to folks who are in the United States is it’s illegal to cross between border crossings,” he said. “It’s also unsafe.”

Source: ‘A cat-and-mouse game of epic proportions’: What Trump’s mass deportations and immigration enforcement mean to Canada