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Jean-Pierre Fortin, the national president of Canada’s Customs and Immigration Union, tells the Washington Post that the country is “absolutely convinced that there will be another wave” of asylum seekers if Donald Trump’s administration ends Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who currently have permission to live in the U.S.:
Already last week, acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke announced she was lifting protected status for 2,500 Nicaraguans, effective January 2019. And while she extended the same protection for 57,000 Hondurans until July 2018, she warned that protection may end at that time.
The U.S. government decided to protect both groups from deportation following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch in 1999, and the measures were repeatedly renewed until this year. Duke said the original conditions justifying that protection “no longer exist.” Canada and its immigrant-friendly policies may be seen as a viable alternative for those reluctant to return to their countries of origin.
In total, more than 300,000 TPS recipients—a program implemented by President George H.W. Bush for people whose nations are facing “ongoing violence, disasters, or conditions that make their return impossible”—from El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras will find out within the next few weeks if they’ll be torn from their lives in the U.S., forced underground, or flee for Canada.
It could be a mirror of what Canadian officials saw following the 2016 presidential election and Trump’s poorly attended inauguration but on a much larger scale, when droves of asylum-seekers presented themselves at the U.S./Canada border. "There's quite an increase in people walking through illegally," Cpl. Camille Habel, spokesperson with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said in February. The New York Times even reported at the time that traffic to the Canadian citizenship and immigration website caused it to crash.
According to the Washington Post, Canada has seen 11,000 more asylum seekers compared to this time last year, and while Canadian consulates in the U.S. “have been recruited to spread the message that asylum is not automatic,” Canadian officials still expect those numbers to easily skyrocket depending on the administration’s actions on TPS within the next few weeks:
In July and August, as many as 250 people a day crossed a ditch at the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, N.Y., into rural Quebec, most of them Haitians fearful that the protected status they received after the 2010 earthquake would soon end. (A ruling is expected from Homeland Security this month.)
The numbers have declined since then, with 50 to 60 migrants still crossing daily but government officials insisting they are doing what they can to discourage new arrivals. So far this year, more than 35,000 asylum seekers have landed in the country, up from 24,000 in the same period in 2016.
The summer surge forced officials to house asylum seekers at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and other temporary locations. While the numbers have since receded and the stadium site was closed, border officials recently installed heated trailers at the border in anticipation of continued crossings during the winter.
Border crossings during the winter could prove to be incredibly dangerous. Some asylum seekers last winter crossed with infants as young as six months old. Others suffered severe damage to their fingers, with one man saying “his hands were so frozen it sounded like when glasses are clinked together”:
Hussein Ahmed and Mohamed Hossain moved as quickly as they could through the waist-deep snow. They were fleeing the United States for Canada, terrified but determined to get to safety.
"Sometimes we were crawling," Ahmed, 34, says. "It was terrible. ... I thought I would never survive such a field of ice." [...]
The men began having sleepless nights because of US President Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric. Then he signed an executive order temporarily barring refugees, and all travelers from Somalia. That was the final sign. They hatched a plan to leave.
Now, TPS recipients face similar fears, because the administration could take documented immigrants who have built families and lives here—some have lived here since the inception of the program—and in one move make them undocumented. And as advocates note, conditions have not improved enough in several of the nations to justify ending TPS. Haiti is still trying to recover from a series of natural disasters and deadly cholera outbreak, and El Salvador continues to experience one of the most deadly murder rates in the world.
The solution is an easy one, and that should be that the administration should continue extending TPS so that people can continue living and working here. Better yet, pass legislation to let them stay permanently. But this is also an administration hell bent on making America white. The U.S. is supposed to be the shining city on the hill, but we’re failing at that.