Advocates sound the alarm on increased deportations in Canada
By Jill Macyshon, Noushin Ziafati
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WINNIPEG, TORONTO (CTV Network) — For eight years, Tareq Abuznaid has called Canada his home. His parents work here. His siblings go to school. But now, he fears he’ll become a statistic. The 19-year-old said he and his family who, except for his young brother, do not currently have Canadian citizenship, received notice in August that they must leave the country. Abuznaid said he’s facing a threat of deportation back to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he was born, amid a two-month war that has left more than 1,200 people in Israel and upwards of 16,200 Palestinians dead, according to authorities on both sides. Meanwhile, Abuznaid said the rest of his family is being threatened with deportation back to Chile, where his parents have citizenship, which he also called “dangerous” because of the discrimination they faced while there. “The government wants to deport us for basically no reason and my fear is that my family will be separated,” he told CTV National News in an interview Thursday. “They will be deported back to Chile in South America and I will be deported back to Palestine in the West Bank, (where) a genocide is currently happening. And … it’s just basically a death sentence for both me and my family.” Cases like these are becoming increasingly common, advocates say. At a virtual press conference Thursday, they sounded the alarm about the rise in deportations in Canada and called on the federal government to follow through on its 2021 promise(opens in a new tab) to expand a regularization program for undocumented people living in this country. The Migrant Rights Network, a national coalition of 40 organizations fighting for migrant rights and justice, said based on Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) data it received through access to information requests, 7,032 people were deported from Canada in the first half of 2023 alone — on track to far exceed the number of deportations for the entirety of 2021 and 2022. On average, this amounts to 39 people being deported from Canada each day so far this year, said Mary Gellatly, a community legal worker at Parkdale Community Legal Services. By comparison, an average of 21 people were deported per day in 2021 and 23 people were deported per day in 2022, she noted. “The results are really alarming,” Gellatly said at the press conference. “Many of these people could have avoided the horrendous experience of deportation if the government had moved on its 2021 promise to regularize undocumented people.”
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