Background Safe Third Country Agreement After the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Canada and the U.S. worked together to improve border security. Among many agreements signed was the
Safe Third Country Agreement, (CUSTCA, more commonly just STCA) stipulating that refugees coming to either country must apply for
asylum in the first one they reach. It was generally seen at the time it was signed in 2002 as being sought primarily by Canada, to prevent refugees from "asylum-shopping". In 2004 it came into force and the amount of asylum applications to Canada began to drop; three years later a Canadian
Federal Court ruled the treaty
unconstitutional, on the basis that U.S. law did not offer the same protections as Canada for applicants, but that decision was in turn overturned by an appeals court on procedural grounds. (RCMP) on Canadian side of border at Roxham advise a family about to cross that they will be taken into custody if they enter here Under the STCA, any prospective refugee who does not have an application for asylum already pending in Canada will be refused admission to the country if they enter from the U.S. Those refugees would then have to return to the U.S., where their attempt to exit would nullify any application process they had begun for
asylum in the U.S. and lead to their detention pending deportation as illegal aliens. But this provision of the agreement applies only to those who present themselves at official
ports of entry. Should they cross the border anywhere else, they would be entering unlawfully as long as they did not go to the nearest border crossing and present themselves to
Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) personnel for inspection and processing. Those taken into custody before reaching a border station are detained, cannot be returned to the U.S. until their case is handled, and may file an asylum application. Since most refugees are taken to customs after being taken into custody soon after their border crossing, they may not have even broken the law, Also, Canada, like the U.S., is signatory to the 1951
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Unlike the U.S., it has incorporated the Convention's provisions into its
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. One of those provisions provides that the mode of a refugee's entry into Canada cannot be held against them if they are found to have had well-founded fears of persecution in their homeland. but beyond that to the courts. Refugees applying from outside Canada do not have recourse to that extensive appeals process. While waiting for their claims to be resolved, refugees in Quebec receive significant benefits. They can work in addition to collecting a stipend of
$C600 a month, receive free health care, free French lessons, and have their children educated in public school, albeit in French as Quebec mandates for immigrants. Since it often takes several years to fully resolve a claim, the system creates what Keller describes as a
perverse incentive for an applicant to somehow get to Canada and then make their claim: "[A] refugee claim made on Canadian soil is a backdoor way for an economic migrant to spend a few years, possibly many years, legally working in Canada." The Canadian populace and government thus often has a negative response to any reports of significant attempts by immigrants to enter Canada outside official channels.
2015–2017: Irregular border crossings at Roxham While the use of Roxham and other irregular border crossings into Canada by refugees seeking asylum there would later be blamed on
the Trump administration's immigration policies, it began, according to
Queen's University researcher Christian Leuprecht, during
Barack Obama's first term as U.S. president, when deportations increased. During 2015, residents of Roxham Road, on both sides of the border, first noticed refugees using their street to enter Canada and request asylum. By the end of the year the RCMP presence at the border cul-de-sac was continuous. Others crossed open fields, sometimes suffering permanent injury or death from
hypothermia in the severe
Great Plains winter weather. Two
Ghanaian refugees'
frostbitten fingers had to be amputated after they spent a night at temperatures around buried to their waists in a snowbank; another woman from their country was found dead in the snow a half-mile (800 m) south of the border. Many of those who crossed at Roxham in 2016 came to Canada fleeing armed conflict elsewhere in the world, the RCMP officers who apprehended them said. Others, including
Chadians and
Eritreans, had been expelled from
Saudi Arabia after finding themselves unemployed there and did not want to return to their homelands, where they might have to render military service.
Sudan,
Syria and
Yemen, all riven by domestic conflict, also accounted for many seeking asylum. In the first nine months of 2016 Canada granted asylum to 62 percent of those crossing the border irregularly. The following day,
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had personally greeted the first of 25,000
Syrian refugees at
Toronto Pearson International Airport within a month of assuming the post,
tweeted: "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength
#WelcomeToCanada". Shortly afterward the media reported that crossings at Roxham Road had increased. One February morning the
Montreal Gazette counted 19 before 10 a.m.; Canadian immigration activists, along with some normally apolitical residents on the U.S. side of Roxham, The Obama administration reviewed, and renewed, Haitian TPS every 18 months for the remainder of his presidential term. But even before Trump announced in 2017 that his administration might not be renewing Haitian TPS the following year, Haitians who had been hoping for
green cards and permanent-resident status, decided they could not wait, and went to Roxham Road to cross into Canada and apply for asylum. It has been estimated that 7.5 percent of the Haitians living in the U.S. with TPS chose to seek refugee status in Canada by entering irregularly. In May 2018 it was reported that only 9.5 percent of the Haitians who had crossed into Canada irregularly had had their asylum claims accepted. The Haitians were attracted to Quebec, and
Montreal specifically, as a destination for resettlement since Haitians, most fleeing the
"Papa Doc" Duvalier dictatorship, had emigrated there since the early 1960s, and spoke well of the city to others. In October, the
Toronto Star reported that irregular entrants at Roxham had been required to fill out a three-page questionnaire that asked, in addition to relevant questions about criminal history, possible terror group connections, and how and why they got there, questions about their religious beliefs and practice, such as whether they or their wives wore Islamic female garments like a
hijab,
chador or
niqab, and how they might feel about working for a woman, questions that some applicants found unnecessary and intrusive. Canadian Muslim activists alleged that it was part of a pattern of
Islamophobic behavior by law enforcement. The RCMP explained that it had been developed from an interview guide developed for the officers at Roxham and would be immediately discontinued as "inappropriate and inconsistent with government policy." Later the RCMP agreed to redact the answers to those questions from digital copies of those questionnaires. After refugees' initial entry, they were taken to a nearby encampment to live while they awaited the results of initial security checks. Following that, they were housed in Montreal, either at
Olympic Stadium or a former hospital, while their claims were pending before the
Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB). a distance of one way and almost six hours' uninterrupted driving time from Kennedy Airport. Canadian authorities eventually began pressuring their U.S. counterparts to more diligently screen Nigerian visa applicants; and by 2019 the U.S. was granting 10 percent fewer tourist visas to Nigerians. Politicians in Quebec also raised complaints.
François Legault, then leader of the
Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), said in August 2017 that the federal government was being "completely irresponsible" and allowing the border to become a "sieve".
Quebec premier Philippe Couillard criticized Legault's calls for tighter border controls as intemperate, saying they demonstrated "a sheer lack of leadership." Quebec's Official Opposition, the
Parti Québécois, had also raised questions about the province's capacity to absorb the refugee influx, but had not gone as far as Legault had in calling for a more restrictive border policy. But in April 2018, as it was reported that the amount of refugees crossing at Roxham had increased by 2,000 over the same period the preceding year, its leader,
Jean-François Lisée, told reporters before a party caucus session that a fence should be built at the site. "We have the best known irregular road in the world," he complained. "We have several good fence builders in Quebec, so we're spoiled for choice." He suggested it could be paid for by "the Mexicans", a joking reference to the
similar barrier being built by the Trump administration on the U.S.-Mexico border. All the province's other party heads condemned the suggestion, as well as the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which called it "legally and morally wrong". On
Canada Day 2017, members of the Quebec far-right groups
La Meute and
Storm Alliance, who had been discreetly observing the crossings for some time beforehand, staged a small protest at the Canadian side of Roxham Road, arguing that members of terrorist groups and criminals were being allowed into Canada there. A smaller group of pro-migrant protestors
counterdemonstrated, with the RCMP and
Sûreté du Québec keeping the two groups apart. Canadian activist
Jaggi Singh was arrested and charged with assault on an officer at those protests after he led a group of demonstrators onto the A-15 near the Montée Guay interchange with the intent of blocking traffic, an action which delayed the arrival of the far-right protesters. After an August 2017 protest over Roxham Road in
Quebec City, Trudeau, while reiterating that Canada welcomes refugees, reminded those seeking to come that Canada is "also a country of laws" and exhorted asylum seekers to go through the formal legal process by applying overseas before coming to Canada.
Haitian Canadian MP
Emmanuel Dubourg, who himself had come to Canada as a young man, went to
Miami, home to
200,000 Haitian expatriates, to make the same plea. He reminded Haitians there that only half of those seeking asylum in Canada ultimately received it, and that the Canadian government was not only willing to deport unsuccessful claimants, it had already done so. "It's important to tell them that before they sell their things, before they take any kind of decision [to come]", he said. "They have to know full well what can happen." Following the example of Dubourg's trip to Miami the year before, in May 2018 Hussen, who had himself
come to Canada in his youth as a Somali refugee, went to Nigeria to speak with American diplomats and government officials there and get the message to Nigerians that Roxham Road was not the path to asylum in Canada. At a news conference prior to his departure, accompanied by
Transport Minister Marc Garneau and
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, Hussen stressed that "[w]e value our relationship with Nigeria but this is a real issue and they need to help us address the issue of Nigerian nationals abusing the visa system to come to Canada and claiming asylum." He warned that only 10 percent of the Nigerians who had crossed at Roxham had been granted asylum (at the same time it was also reported that the acceptance rate for Nigerians was 33.5 percent). at that time only 1 percent of the 28,000 irregular crossers had been removed from Canada. In October 2018
Quebec held provincial elections. The CAQ, previously the third-strongest party in
the provincial legislature, won a majority of its 125 seats, consigning Couillard's ruling
Quebec Liberal Party (QLP) to the opposition, and in turn the former opposition
Parti Quebecois to a mere 10 seats, its worst performance since
1970 when it had first gained seats. It was the first election in Quebec since then to return a party other than the QLP or PQ to power, and like that
Union Nationale government it was right-of-center. Legault and the CAQ had run in part on his promise to reduce immigration to the province. For 2018, the IRB reported 20,607 total asylum applications from irregular entrants. Over a thousand
Colombians entered at Roxham, as well. She and 44 other residents in the area eventually split $405,000, the individual payments based on how close they lived to the border. The Roxham Road residents were not the only parties compensated. In mid-2018 the federal government had offered Manitoba, Ontario (where many of the non-Francophone refugee claimants preferred to resettle) and Quebec $50 million each to offset the cost of supporting asylum seekers; at the beginning of 2019 it made $115 million available to provincial and
local governments to cover refugees' temporary housing costs. Ontario and Quebec said that by that point they had spent $200 and $300 million each by then. Trudeau, praising the cooperation of the governments of Quebec and
Toronto with the federal government on the issue, said they would get more money. Later in the year, Quebec got $250 million. In mid-2018
newly elected Progressive Conservative premier
Doug Ford announced the provincial government was withdrawing its support for the more than 3,000 refugees temporarily housed in Toronto, since "this mess was 100 percent the result of the federal government" and had created a housing crisis in the city. Ford's timing put the federal government in a difficult position, since some of the refugees were housed in college dormitories that had to be available for students before the end of the summer. Trudeau, after meeting with Ford, said that "it didn't seem to me that the Premier was quite as aware of our international obligations to the UN Convention on Refugees as he might have been. So I spent a little time explaining how the asylum-seeking system works and how our system is supposed to operate," remarks that
Lisa MacLeod, Ford's
Minister of Children, Community and Social Services, termed "disrespectful" on the Prime Minister's part. The federal government allocated $11 million of the $50 million it had offered Ontario to the Toronto city government. Facing
an election campaign late in 2019, the Liberal government took some actions. Early in the year a woman was charged in Quebec with organizing illegal entry into Canada for compensation at Roxham Road. Two months later, the government included a provision in its annual
budget bill intended to partially address the flow of refugees to Roxham Road and other irregular border crossings. It barred anyone with an asylum claim pending in any of the other four
Five Eyes countries Canada shares intelligence with—Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.—from applying for asylum in Canada. The intent was to frustrate "country shopping", Blair said. "If people are pursuing their claims in the United States, we wanted them to understand that they should stay there, because that's a safe place, and to pursue their claim in that place." The statute came into effect that June. Opposition leader
Andrew Scheer regularly said that irregular entrants were "jumping the queue" and "gaming the system" at the expense of lawful applicants. Hussen responded that Scheer was indulging in "the same sort of extreme right wing anti-immigration rhetoric that has become pervasive among right-wing populist parties around the world." Scheer had said he based that claim on letters he had read from refugees applying for asylum in Canada from camps abroad wondering how it was that people just walking into Canada could legitimately apply for asylum when they would not be able to enter until their applications were approved. It was pointed out that applicants abroad are primarily processed by the UN, not IRBC, so the irregular entrants were not tying up bureaucratic resources, so there was no queue to jump. Scheer's Conservatives and the country's other parties began making their immigration and border policy proposals known. He said in an October speech at Roxham that Trudeau had created this problem and yet done nothing to address it in two years. The Conservatives would, by contrast, hire 250 more CBSA officers. He expressed concern that members of the
Salvadoran gang
MS-13 had been able to enter Canada through Roxham, and called for the country to withdraw from the UN's
Global Compact for Migration and renegotiate the STCA to apply to the entire border, not just ports of entry. Rempel, his party's critic on the issue, had already suggested in 2018 that Canada declare its entire border to be a port of entry, a solution that was criticized as not only incapable of solving the problem but capable of creating others. Early in 2019 the overall amount of irregular crossers dropped from the year before, with only 6,864 coming into Canada that way through June. In third place for the first half of 2019 were refugees from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, with 485, likewise a drop from their numbers the year before. The pandemic
did greatly reduce the flow of refugees at the crossing; in the second quarter of the year IRBC processed only 356 irregular entrants, a decline of almost 90 percent from the quarter before and slightly more than that from the same period in 2019. unless their claim involved one of the exceptions from the STCA. By early April, only six had attempted to seek asylum and only one of those had been allowed to enter and apply for asylum. Immigration activists criticized the move since it many of those refugees turned away were likely to be imprisoned and deported to their home countries once returned to the U.S., which would put Canada in violation of the
non-refoulement provisions of international law, under which asylum claimants are not to be returned to the countries they fled. An
Afghan woman who had crossed at Roxham after finishing law school in the U.S. credited that decision with saving her life and excoriated Trudeau for effectively closing the crossing. The
Toronto Sun, which had been critical of Trudeau's government on immigration among many other issues, expressed gratitude for the closure. "It's obviously the right decision and should have been made a long time ago", the paper editorialized. "Let's hope they don't reopen it once COVID-19 is over." In July Canadian
Federal Court Justice Anne Marie McDonald ruled that the STCA was unconstitutional. The case had been brought by the
Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) against the IRBC. Among several witnesses was Nedira Jemal Mustafa, an
Ethiopian woman who had lived in the U.S. since she came for medical treatment at 12. Unwilling to return to Ethiopia due to civil unrest there, and unaware that she needed to take steps if she wanted to remain in the U.S., she let her visa lapse. In April 2017 she went to the
Blackpool border crossing and attempted to apply for asylum. Since the STCA prevented her from making the application at a port of entry, she was returned to the U.S., whereupon she was taken into custody by the Border Patrol and held in a cold cell at
Clinton Correctional Facility in nearby
Dannemora for a month, McDonald held that since any refugee returned to the U.S. is usually detained, and Canadian officials knew this, Mustafa's treatment was entirely
foreseeable and thus her constitutional rights, as well as those of all other refugees similarly detained, were violated. The decision would not take effect for six months. In October the
Federal Court of Appeal granted the government's request for a
stay pending further appeals. The pandemic had a beneficial effect for some migrants who had already entered Canada. In August the government granted permanent residency to those applicants who had cared for COVID-19 patients in hospitals and long-term care, a service that was particularly appreciated in Quebec. To be eligible they had to have had an asylum application pending since before March 13, worked 120 hours in patient care as of August 14 and be on track to have worked in health care for six months by August 31, 2021. Approximately a thousand asylum seekers were eligible. In September a U.S. appeals court overruled one of the lower courts that had blocked the Trump administration's revocation of TPS for several nationalities, including Haitians. The decision, as one of the three judges on the panel noted, had no practical effect since an earlier decision by a different lower federal court granting the same preliminary injunction remained in effect.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that TPS would remain in effect for Haitians as long as the injunction did, but that work permits would remain in effect through October 2021. In the latter half of 2020 less than 300 irregular entrants had their applications accepted for processing. "national interest" exemption to its travel restrictions, which had most notably been used earlier in the year to allow European professional hockey players to travel in and out of Canada in order for the
National Hockey League to complete its season. Refugee advocates, noting the accounts of irregular entrants, like Mustefa, denied admission to Canada and then detained on their return to the U.S., took the move as a tacit admission by the government that its original plans were not working out. A
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman said that returnees from Canada were not likely to be removed if they had valid documentation to remain in the U.S.
Marco Mendicino, who had succeeded Hussen as Immigration Minister, said the STCA would continue to be enforced at the border. "For the last three years," he said in a statement, "Canada has welcomed more refugees than any other country in the world, and continues to provide protection to those fleeing conflict and persecution ... The STCA remains a comprehensive means for the compassionate, fair, and orderly handling of asylum claims at the Canada-U.S. land border." Refugee advocates were dismayed, with one calling the decision "a step backward for human rights". Lawyers argued that the FCA had, in holding that detention upon return to the US was merely discretionary, ignored evidence that it was a likely outcome for most. And while they agreed with the court that their case implicated the process rather than the law, they complained that it was difficult to mount such a challenge due to the government's reluctance to share records of the process due to confidentiality requirements. In August, Canada reopened its border to American visitors with
proof of
vaccination; the next month this permission was extended to
all vaccinated foreign nationals. This led to refugees who had been sent back to the U.S. returning to Roxham in the belief that they would again be allowed to cross and make asylum claims, leading to a significant rise in crossings for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. Most were again refused and while some were detained by U.S. immigration authorities many were sheltered in hotels and apartments in Plattsburgh in the meantime; according to a local aid worker there were more than a hundred families in this situation at one point. At the same time, refugees who had been turned back earlier in the pandemic started getting called back to the border to finish their applications; those who could prove vaccination were prioritized. Most of the refugees who had temporarily sheltered in Plattsburgh left for Roxham as soon as word of the reopening reached them. CCR director Janet Dench approved of the crossing's reopening, but said it should never have been closed in the first place. She also renewed her call for Canada to exit the STCA. In 2022, it was reported that following the relaxation of the pandemic restrictions, irregular entries into Canada had reached their highest level since mid-2017, with 2,811 crossing in December 2021, mostly in Quebec, and numbers for early 2022 remaining above 2,000 per month (reported to be about 7,000 total by the middle of the year Legault asked the federal government to close the Roxham Road crossing in May, saying Quebec's public and private social resources to take care of them were being stressed. Advocates for refugees disputed that. "The refugee organizations in Montreal have said very clearly that they do have capacity," said Wendy Ayotte, one of the founders of Bridges Not Borders, a local organization that assists asylum seekers at Roxham, who lives near the crossing. She and other advocates warned that if Roxham were to be closed, smuggling and its attendant risks to asylum seekers would increase.
2023: STCA renegotiation and permanent closure In January 2023 Canada reported nearly 5,000 crossings at Roxham, more than twice as many as that month the year before. In late March the two countries announced that they had agreed to new terms for the STCA that would discourage crossings at Roxham by allowing either country to deport to the other country noncitizens who have illegally or irregularly crossed the border and requested asylum within 14 days of entry. As the number of asylum seekers dwindled as a result of the new agreement, the crossing was shut down permanently on March 25, 2023, after upwards of 100,000 entered Canada through it. The processing facility building was demolished on September 25. Its work is complemented on the U.S. side by Plattsburgh Cares, which aroused some controversy in Canada for producing multilingual pamphlets advising refugees on not only how to reach and cross the border safely but how to apply for asylum once in Canada. Hussen and Rempel said the pamphlet painted an overly simple and vague picture of how the Canadian asylum system works. The two groups work together. Taxi drivers in the Plattsburgh area, some of whom have been the subject of a CBC documentary short,
Road to Roxham, have found the refugees to be lucrative passengers; some have even gone into the business strictly to transport refugees to the end of Roxham. They await arrivals at
Plattsburgh International Airport,
the city's train station and the
Greyhound bus depot at a gas station on
U.S. Route 9 just north of the city. Many have posted decals on their vehicles giving fare information for Roxham Road, a half-hour, trip from Plattsburgh. Gang or family violence was another driver, particularly among those from Latin America. Yet others feared persecution over their sexuality Canada is more likely to grant asylum in both those cases than the U.S. ==See also==