Migrants behind bars longer as feds extend immigration detention contracts

Alberta was poised to become the first Canadian province to stop incarcerating migrants detained by Ottawa for administrative reasons but instead extended its contract with the federal government three days before the previous contract was set to expire.

Its agreement on immigration detention was to end on June 30, 2023, followed by British Columbia at the end of July.

But the federal government and the two provinces have agreed to respective contract extensions: Alberta until Sept. 29, 2023 and B.C. until Oct. 31, 2023.

The office of Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, which is responsible for the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), has confirmed these extensions to Radio-Canada/CBC.

Hanna Gros, refugee lawyer and researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the decision is “inexcusable” and “shameful.”

 “It seems the federal government is insisting on continuing to violate human rights in this Kafkaesque system,” she said.

The imprisonment of migrants for administrative reasons is considered contrary to international law by many experts and lawyers. What’s more, migrants never know when they will get out of prison, because there is no time limit on immigration detention in Canada.

However, B.C. has indicated that the extension only affects foreign nationals already imprisoned and that the province will no longer accept new immigration detainees starting Aug. 1, 2023.

So far, eight provinces — including Ontario and Quebec — have given Ottawa the one-year notice required to rescind their agreements on immigration detention.

Letter to PM calls for end to migrant incarceration

Earlier this week, 45 Canadian and international groups sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau calling on his government to put an immediate end to the imprisonment of migrants. The signatories expressed concern that the federal government had started transferring immigration detainees to other provinces, rather than releasing them.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw authorities release people from immigration detention at unprecedented rates and the sky didn’t fall,” Gros said.

She said dozens of community-based organizations across Canada can provide support that is tailored to migrants and refugee claimants.

The vast majority of immigration detainees are held because CBSA believes they will not appear for immigration processes, such as a removal.

Between 2015 and 2020, roughly a quarter of the 8,000 migrants detained on average each year by CBSA were sent to provincial jails.

By 2021-2022, the number of immigration detainees had fallen to about 3,000, but close to a quarter of them were still kept in provincial jails. The others were mostly detained in one of the three federal immigration holding centers.

Minister Mendicino’s office says the government continues to reduce the use of jails and that three-quarters of the migrants still being held “are there because of serious criminality.”

Immigration lawyers have pointed out that these are prior convictions that have often happened when migrants were young or that were linked to crimes that do not pose a threat to society.