Thank you very much.
Good afternoon. I thank you for this opportunity to address the committee. My remarks will focus on the Canada-U.S. safe third country agreement, the STCA.
As you know, the legal prerequisite for the STCA is that both the U.S. and Canada are safe countries in which to seek and to obtain refugee protection. If the United States is not safe, Canada violates the charter and international law by returning refugee claimants to the United States.
Under the STCA and the legislation implementing it, the U.S. will be unsafe if it sends refugees back to countries where they will not be protected from persecution or from onward deportation to a country where they have a well-founded fear of persecution. This is known as refoulement.
The United States will also be unsafe if it subjects refugee claimants to arbitrary human rights violations on U.S. territory, including arbitrary detention and other forms of abuse.
In mid-2023, the Supreme Court of Canada found that the United States, at that time, was a safe country. It did so by overturning findings of fact made by the trial judge at the first hearing of the STCA case, and in particular, findings that refugee claimants were subject to arbitrary detention in abusive circumstances. The Supreme Court found that detention was not routine for asylum seekers and that detention conditions amounting to abuse could not have been reasonably foreseen by Canadian officials.
This judgment about the United States is only as durable as the underlying facts upon which it's based, so if the facts about the United States have changed, the conclusions of the Supreme Court of Canada will no longer be valid in the present.
What's been happening in the United States since January 2025? Let me give you some examples.
First, the United States has barred all asylum claims made at the Mexico-U.S. border. To bar asylum claims directly violates the United States' obligations under the UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which obliges states to extend protection to those who meet the definition of a refugee at or within their borders.
Second, the United States has entered into several agreements with other states to which it will send asylum seekers. These are not necessarily countries that asylum seekers have passed through en route to the United States; they are random third countries. Many of these countries have abysmal human rights records and are not safe. They include Sudan, Eswatini, Honduras and Rwanda, among other countries. People deported there face imprisonment, human rights abuses and possibly removal to face persecution in their countries of origin.
Third, the U.S. government now uses those third country agreements as the basis for terminating asylum claims already made in the United States. It does so through a process known as pretermission. This is one of several strategies the United States government has deployed to deny asylum seekers access to a fair process in the United States and to deport them to countries where they may face persecution on site or refoulement—being returned to their country of origin to face a well-founded fear of persecution.
Turning to conditions of human rights for asylum seekers within the United States, I'll give you the example of detention. If you'll recall, the Supreme Court of Canada found that detention was not automatic and not abusive. Today, one year after President Trump entered his second term, the use of detention is now mandatory and automatic for people in what is called expedited removal, many of whom are asylum seekers.
So far, over 70,000 people have been detained in the United States, which is a 75% increase over one year. Over 90% of this growth is in detention of people—including children—with no criminal convictions.
Detention conditions are widely reported to violate fundamental human rights—physical, sexual and psychological rights, rights against child abuse—with inadequate food, medical neglect, poor sanitation, etc. Thirty-eight people have died in U.S. immigration detention in the last year. All evidence points incontrovertibly to the conclusion that the United States is not presently a safe country in which to seek or to obtain refugee protection.
Meanwhile, the current Canadian government has redoubled its efforts to enforce the STCA. It refuses to publicly explain why it continues to enforce the agreement in the face of overwhelming evidence that the United States is not safe. Efforts to seek accountability through the courts are stonewalled.
This is my ask, my request to you: I call on you, as a committee, to require the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship and the deputy minister to justify, with evidence, the continued designation of the United States as a safe country in which to seek and to obtain refugee protection. In the absence of this justification, Canada must withdraw from the STCA immediately and divert resources to safe, regular and orderly processing of refugee claimants at Canadian ports of entry along the Canada-U.S. border.
Thank you very much.
