The US Is No Longer A Safe Third Country

For more than 20 years, Canada and the United States have had the “Safe Third Country Agreement” which operates on the principle that a person claiming refugee status must do so in the first safe country in which they arrive. It is time for Canada to withdraw from that agreement.

The presumption is that both Canada and the United States are safe countries and, up until two weeks ago, that was basically true. Since Trump took office, he has started mass deportations, empowered and encouraged his law enforcement agencies to arrest people on the street on suspicion of being illegal residents, and announced the creation of his first concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In the mere 13 days since Trump has taken office, the safety of travellers, immigrants, Indigenous people, and natural-born Unites States citizens who authorities view as not likely to be American, the implications of which should be obvious, are in grave danger. He has attempted to end birthright citizenship in violation of the 14th amendment, further targeting people he views as inferior.

The various enforcement agencies, led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, have been performing raids all across the country on the premise that they are looking for criminals. They arrested nearly 1200 people in a single raid a few days ago in Chicago, half of which have no criminal history. There are also serious reports surfacing of members of the Navajo first nation being arrested on suspicion of being illegal aliens. One wonders where Trump plans to send America’s Indigenous people.

Last week, the US sent two military planes full of deportees to Colombia without seeking the country’s permission, a faux pas in international relations when sending military aircraft, and the flights were not permitted to land. Trump reacted by threatening significant tariffs on the country if they did not accept the flights, and Colombia backed down in the interests of avoiding a trade war. Two other deportee flights were accepted in Honduras and Guatemala the same day, while Brazil forced a deportation flight to uncuff all the passengers in Manaus, and Mexico rejected similar flights.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced the revocation of protection against deportation for 600,000 Venezuelan immigrant in the United States.

At the same time, he announced the expansion of a “migrant facility” to hold 30,000 people at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to, in Trump’s own words, “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.”

Like President Bush before him, he intends to use a piece of occupied land in Cuba because it is not within the constitutionally protected land of the United States. It is an overseas military base where their basic rights simply don’t exist. It is why the United States opened a temporary prison to place and torture the most dangerous captives from their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a small handful of those still remain, in spite of a 2009 order by Obama for it to be closed by 2010 for which Congress refused funding until Trump rescinded the order in 2018 to keep it open.

Migrants have been kept at Guantanamo Bay in the past, once having hosted 30,000 Cuban refugees for two years while they were processed. The key difference here is that, that time, they were processed.

The whole purpose of placing people captured in the United States there this time is to ensure that they do not get any kind of due process, to isolate them from the constitution and the rule of law and ensure that they are neither visible to the American public nor have access to its legal system, and to prevent them from ever leaving. It is nothing less than a concentration camp.

When refugee claimants arrived in Canada by the thousands at Roxham Rd, they exploited a hole in the Canada-United States Safe Third Country agreement that only required refugees arriving at official points of entry to be returned to the safe country through which they had arrived. Our two countries eventually changed the agreement to apply to the entire Canada-US border in 2022.

The idea of the agreement is that for someone seeking refugee status, making it to a safe country is the objective. If they arrived in Canada first, that is where they would be processed. If they arrived in the United States first, that is where they would be processed. They had, in either case, arrived in a safe refuge from whatever they were fleeing.

It is no longer safe for refugees and other undocumented migrants to go to or stay in the United States. It is not even safe for some passport-carrying citizens to walk in the streets. They risk harassment by American authorities, summary deportation, or indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay.

Article 33 of the United Nations Refugee Convention reads:

No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

According to the Canadian government information sheet on the Safe Third Country Agreement,

Section 102 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) permits the designation of safe third countries for the purpose of sharing the responsibility for refugee claims. Only countries that respect human rights and offer a high degree of protection to asylum seekers may be designated as safe third countries.

To date, the United States is the only designated safe third country.

This is demonstrably no longer true.

Under the same section of the same act, Canada must withdraw from the Safe Third Country agreement and not only accept refugees arriving via the United States, but accept refugee claimants from the United States, and for the same reason.