A story in today’s Guardian paints a sad picture of our country. I actually cried as I read the details about asylum seekers trudging through freezing weather to escape the United States in order to cross into Canada. Fearful of Donald Trump’s actions, 22 people walked across the border over the weekend. An agency working to resettle refugees and immigrants saw 10 refugee claims in one day, topping previous numbers. Eight walked into Canada to avoid the border patrol.
“They’re not crossing at the actual point where there’s an immigration and customs offices,” said Rita Chahal of the Manitoba Interfaith Immigration Council. “They’re walking through prairie fields with lots and lots of deep snow. In Europe we’re seeing people in boats; now just imagine a prairie flatland and snow for miles and miles.”
More than 7000 refugees entered Canada by land in 2016, up 63% from 2015. Another 2000 are believed to have entered illegally. Two refugees from Ghana, Seidu Mohammed and Razak Iyal, were found on Christmas Eve, walking through waist-high snow in Manitoba. They had paid C$400 for a cab ride from North Dakota to the border.
Mohammed, 24, said he had fled Ghana over fears of being persecuted for being gay and Muslim. After a judge in the US denied his asylum request, he was facing deportation. He met Iyal, 35 and also from Ghana, in the US, and the pair decided to try their luck at making it to Canada.
Woefully underdressed for a winter that ranks among the coldest in recent years, the pair walked for hours, trudging through darkened fields and fighting past brush to make it into Canada. “We didn’t feel any sign, but we could feel we are in Canada, because of the cold – very, very intense,” Mohammed told Macleans magazine. Disoriented from the cold and suffering severe frostbite, the pair eventually stumbled upon a highway, where a trucker stopped to help them.
Both men ended up in hospital; Mohammed had to have all of his fingers amputated, while Iyal lost all of his fingers except for his thumbs to frostbite.
Amnesty International in Canada and the US joined forces in calling on Canada to strip the US of its designation as a safe country for refugees. “We are strongly of the view that in this context Canada cannot wait to see how things continue to develop in the days and weeks to come,” the organisation noted in the letter.
“The situation has become so volatile, so entirely unpredictable and marked by such wholesale disregard for international human rights that to allow the designation of the United States to continue for even another day would be utterly untenable,” it added.
It saddens me beyond words that this lying autocrat in the White House is turning this country into a pariah in the world’s eyes. And Congress is cowardly standing by in order to fulfill their dream of destroying anything that hints of the common good.
www.theguardian.com/...d