Montreal, Canada – Donald Trump has been in the White House for less than three weeks, but the United States president has already launched what many say is a concerted attack on the rights of migrants and refugees.
The Republican leader has sent migrants to the notorious detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; pushed for more deportations; effectively banned asylum; and suspended the refugee resettlement programme.
Trump has also used the threat of tariffs to pressure his country’s neighbours — Canada and Mexico — to enact harsher measures at their respective borders to stem irregular migration into the US.
For Canadian rights advocates, the Trump administration’s anti-migrant policies are cause for alarm, and they have called on Canada to stop sending most asylum seekers who arrive at the Canadian border in search of protection back to the US.
“The United States government itself is becoming an agent of persecution of people within its borders,” said Wendy Ayotte, co-founder of Bridges Not Borders, a group that supports refugees and asylum seekers on the Quebec-New York border.
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“When we return people to the United States as we are currently doing, … that makes us complicit with an anti-refugee regime,” Ayotte, who lives in the small Quebec town of Havelock, told Al Jazeera.
“It makes us complicit with the possibility this person will either languish in detention in poor condition or be sent back to their home country.”
Canada-US border agreement
This week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the Trump administration had agreed to a 30-day freeze on planned tariffs for Canadian goods after he made promises to tighten border security.
“Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border,” Trudeau said in a social media post.
“Canada has agreed to ensure we have a secure Northern Border,” Trump added on his Truth Social platform.
The Canadian government had already announced a plan to boost border security late last year, shortly after Trump first threatened to impose the tariffs. That $910m (1.3bn-Canadian-dollar) scheme included investments in drones, helicopters and other surveillance equipment.
Migration at the Canada-US border also is already subject to stringent rules.
In 2023, the two countries expanded what’s known as the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).
Under the pact, which first entered into force in 2024, asylum seekers must seek protection in whichever of the two countries they arrive in first. That means someone who is already in the US cannot make an asylum claim in Canada unless they meet specific exemptions.
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The agreement previously only applied to asylum claims at official ports of entry, meaning that people who crossed into Canada irregularly could have their claims heard once on Canadian soil.
But in March 2023, Trudeau and then-President Joe Biden expanded the STCA to the entirety of the border, including between ports of entry. That has made it even more difficult for people to access the Canadian asylum system.
While there have been a few high-profile cases of people trying to get into the US from Canada, the numbers remain low compared with those at the US-Mexico border.
In the 2024 fiscal year, US Customs and Border Protection reported just under 200,000 encounters with people trying to cross into the country irregularly from Canada. On the US border with Mexico, more than 2.1 million encounters were registered over the same period.
I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly…
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 3, 2025
The Canadian government has defended the STCA as “an important tool” that helps both Canada and the US effectively manage refugee claims.
“Canada and the US continue to benefit from the STCA in managing asylum claims at our shared border, and we expect this to continue,” a spokesperson for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada told Al Jazeera in an email.
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“The Government of Canada strongly discourages irregular border crossings,” the spokesperson said.
“They are illegal, risky and dangerous. We continue working with our US counterparts to respond to illegal northbound and southbound crossings along the border as part of our longstanding, collaborative efforts and mutual interest to keep our communities safe.”
Rights advocates, however, said the agreement does not stop irregular migration but only pushes desperate asylum seekers to take riskier routes in their search for safety.
Gauri Sreenivasan is co-executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), a group involved in a legal challenge against the STCA. The organisation has argued for years that the US is not a safe place for those seeking asylum.
“Certainly, the series of executive orders and the actions that we are now seeing President Trump make [have made] the US dangerously more unsafe for those seeking protections,” Sreenivasan told Al Jazeera.
CCR, Amnesty International Canada and the Canadian Council of Churches have challenged the STCA on the basis that it violates the rights to life, liberty and security as well as the right to equal protection as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on the right to life argument in 2023, saying that while asylum seekers faced possible rights violations in the US, the STCA contained sufficient safety mechanisms to exempt people who might be at risk if sent back.
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But the justices sent the case back to a lower federal court to rule on the equal protection argument. A hearing is expected this year, but no date has been set, Sreenivasan said.
She added that Canada does not need to wait for the courts to rule on the STCA, though.
“They should be able to assess what is happening right now under the series of [Trump] executive orders,” Sreenivasan said, “and clearly identify that conditions are no longer safe, that there is no effective right to asylum in the US.”
‘What do we stand for?’
Anne Dutton, senior counsel at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS) at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said it’s “a very concerning time for asylum” in the US.
“It’s clear that the Trump administration has come in with an agenda of restricting rights and protections for migrants and asylum seekers,” she told Al Jazeera.
CGRS is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that was filed this week against the Trump administration’s effective ban on asylum claims. The ban was laid out in one of the Republican president’s executive actions on the first day of his term, January 20.
The order is being used “to shut the southern border to all migrants, including asylum seekers”, Dutton told Al Jazeera. “It’s really shutting off the opportunity to seek asylum right at the very first point.”
In the face of that, Dutton likewise expressed scepticism that the US is a safe place for asylum seekers.
“The fact that the US is wholesale eliminating access to the asylum process for people in need of protection is a very concerning sign that the US is not actually the safe haven that the Safe Third Country Agreement imagines it to be,” she explained.
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She added that there are also concerns the Trump administration could enact more stringent rules and restrictions for people who are already in the US and want to access protection.
“We’ve seen just an overall increase in hostility towards asylum seekers and upholding our obligations to offer protection to people who need refuge,” Dutton said.
“Definitely the fear is that the second Trump administration is not only going to continue that trajectory but make it significantly worse.”
Back in Canada, Ayotte at Bridges Not Borders said migration has been used as a “political football” by lawmakers north of the border, too – and that is unlikely to change before federal elections this year.
Yet she said politicians and Canadian voters alike face a critical moment.
“As Canadians we have to ask ourselves, do we want to be compliant with this? Just how far are we willing to go to comply … [with] a bully and a racist who has no concern for human life?” she said, referring to Trump.
“I think we have to look ourselves in the face and ask ourselves, ‘What do we stand for?'”
