Last July, a woman from El Salvador arrived at the Fort Erie border crossing in Buffalo, New York, seeking refuge in Canada. The woman, known only as E, was accompanied by her two young daughters, one still young enough to be fed from a bottle. She threw herself on our mercy, filing a refugee claim based on her fear of being deported by the US to her home country, where she says she had been raped by gang members who harangued her family and threatened to kill her.
Because E arrived through the US, she was subject to the Safe Third Country Agreement, which stipulates that a foreign national seeking asylum must do so in the first “safe” country they arrive in. The agreement was signed in 2004, and since then, the landmass of the US has functioned as a bulwark against Canada’s lofty promises that the persecuted, the terrorized and the survivors of war are welcome here. E and her children had escaped to the US in 2016, so her claim was denied.
If our bureaucracy had its way, she and her children would have been sent back to New York. There, the American government would very likely have filed deportation proceedings against her, potentially damning her to die in the country she made such a desperate attempt to escape. If E had arrived at the border in the last two months, rather than last year, she would likely have endured the additional punishment of having her children stripped from her arms, and sorted into one of the makeshift internment camps that the Trump administration has found itself defending in the name of nonexistent laws.
Because this is what the US government does now. It is no longer in the “beacon of freedom” business. This is a country that now signals its values to the rest of the world with the moral stridency of a burning cross. This is the nation we consider a “safe” third country.
The governing Liberal party has repeatedly faced questions in parliament about altering or scrapping the Safe Third Country Agreement, and has repeatedly chosen to punt on the matter. The minister of immigration, Ahmed Hussen, has floated the possibility of modifying the agreement, without committing to a timeline for doing so, or how those modifications would affect the flow of refugees. Justin Trudeau, when questioned, somehow gathered the gall to assert that the government “will not play politics” by suspending the agreement.
Putting aside the inanity of our prime minister using that phrase to describe a political decision, it’s unclear what politics were played at in 2007, when the STP Agreement was struck down by a federal judge. Before its restoration was due to an appeal, it was slammed for its discriminatory process (which allows asylum-seekers to stay if they arrive by air rather than by land), and for America’s repeated failure to comply with human rights conventions.
The circumstances have not changed since 2007. Refugees who arrive on foot to ports of entry risk being turned away and possibly barred from making future claims, which is why many have chosen to cross the border through forests in the freezing cold. Asylum-seekers would rather risk their limbs to frostbite than trust the US government, which arbitrarily cancels their status as protected refugees and whose head of state calls their homelands “shithole” countries.
In recent months, the US has only managed to increase its cruelty, scrapping detention facilities for families (opting instead to place adult asylum seekers in federal prison) and championing the psychological torture of separating children as young as 18 months from their parents. Asylum-seekers along America’s southern borders are increasingly being turned away in defiance of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the Trump administration justifies all of this with the same biblical verses its ideological ancestors once used to justify slavery.
When E’s claim for asylum was denied, the University of Toronto’s Downtown Legal Clinic filed a challenge and won her an appeal, as well as permission to stay in Canada while her case remained before the court. That challenge is currently the basis of an effort to strike down the Safe Third Country Agreement altogether, and has been supported by the Canadian Council of Churches, the Canadian Council for Refugees and Amnesty International. Several law professors across the country have also urged the Canadian government to scrap the agreement.
But this entire procedure could be easily bypassed if our representatives in parliament simply exercised the courage and moral clarity on refugees that they claim to possess but have done remarkably little to demonstrate. They could simply rescind the agreement, and demonstrate that Canada is not a country that sends asylum-seekers away to have their families torn apart by an administration that operates with nakedly racist intent. Or perhaps they could continue to avoid “playing politics” instead, standing by and watching while a human rights atrocity unfolds before our eyes.