Wednesday October 15th from 6:00-8:00
YWCA 733 Beatty St, Vancouver, Unceded Coast Salish Territories
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/1469256423338435/

Every day in the Greater Vancouver area, at various skytrain stations and bus stops, transit police check fares and issue tickets. And every day, some of those people who cannot show proof of purchase are reported to Canada Border Services Agency.

Three hundred and twenty eight people were reported to CBSA by Transit Police last year, one-in-five of whom faced a subsequent immigration investigation. One of these people was Lucia Vega Jiménez, who later committed suicide in a detention center.

And yet, despite how often we see transit police, and how serious their effect on undocumented people is, so many questions remain about their process. For instance, no one has a legal obligation to provide physical proof of identification to transit police, yet it’s still requested in order to verify identity. Most people don’t know this, with the lack of transparency disproportionately affecting migrants as well as racialized, Indigenous and/or poor people.

What exactly happens when transit police make contact with an undocumented resident without proof of fare? On what basis is the transit police referring them to CBSA? Even lawyers have publically stated in media reports that it looks like racial profiling plays a major role in their decisions and that transit police are going out of their way to do random immigration query checks.

We’re calling on members of our communities to come together for a discussion about the collaboration of Translink and transit police with CBSA. We want all residents of the Lower Mainland to access public transit without fear of immigration detention and we want Translink to stop turning people over to CBSA.

At the meeting, we hope to:
– share what we know from our research over the past month
– develop ideas, strategies and solutions on how we can collectively
challenge this current practice.

This meeting is hosted by a joint working group of Sanctuary Health and No One Is Illegal | Personne n’est illégal | Nadie es ilegal.

For more information email omarc@shaw.ca or dtseghay@gmail.com or phone 778-883-6627 or 778-239-3856.

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ACCESSIBILITY:
We will have snacks and bus tickets.
We will also have childcare on-site.