This letter was first presented at a meeting to Vancouver Pride Society in February 2017 and is now being released publicly on May 11, 2017.

Open Letter to the Vancouver Pride Society,

We write this letter as LGBTQIA2+ organizations and individuals and anti-racist community groups with majority queer and trans membership based on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories.

We write to support Black Lives Matter-Vancouver in their calls for the Vancouver Pride Society to remove any and all presence of uniformed police officers (VPD and RCMP) from marching as an institution in the Vancouver Pride Parade in 2017 and onward.

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Border Rights for Refugees

A free multilingual guide for non-U.S. citizens coming to Canada from the U.S. to make a refugee claim.

Share widely: https://noii-van.resist.ca/?p=6487

Thousands of refugees are crossing the Canada-U.S. border, many fleeing escalated sociopolitical, white supremacist, misogynist violence and I.C.E raids in the U.S.

In the first two months of this year, approximately 2000 refugee claims were filed at land ports of entry along the Canadian border. In Quebec alone there are six times more land-border refugee claims than in the same period last year. RCMP have intercepted or arrested (not yet charged) 1,134 refugees – nearly half as many asylum seekers in three months as all of the previous year.

Hundreds have been forced to cross irregularly under dangerous and life-threatening circumstances. People who have contacted us and our networks are primarily from Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Djibouti, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mexico.

The Canadian government and corporate media’s rhetoric about ‘welcoming refugees’ is misleading. There are many discriminatory and unjust barriers, such as the Safe Third Country Agreement that the Canadian government refuses to rescind, and a difficult legal system for refugees to navigate if coming through the U.S. This guide is to better inform and support those making the difficult decision to cross yet another colonial border.

The guide is produced by No One Is Illegal and the Immigration Legal Committee of the Law Union of Ontario. Supported by the African-Canadian Legal Clinic.

PDF of the English here

With professional translations in:
Arabic
Amharic
Chinese (Simplified Script)
Farsi
Filipino (Standardized)
French
Haitian Creole
Kurdish (Sorani)
Pashto
Punjabi
Spanish
Somali
Tamil
Tigrinya
Twi
Urdu
Vietnamese

Freedom to stay, move, and return!

On Sunday, March 13, 2016, Francisco Javier Romero Astorga – our brother, our son – died in immigration detention custody. No one has told us how Francisco died, or why he was in prison. To date, no one from the federal Canadian government, including the Canada Border Services Agency, has contacted us. We do not know of an autopsy and no results of any tests or reasons for his death have been given to us.

All we know is that his body lies in a hospital, and that we must pay nearly $10,000 to bring his body home to give him a proper burial. Our brother, our son’s body has been in a hospital for ten days already, and we are in pain every minute that passes. Behind all this tragedy is a family and a mother who are grieving.

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The death of a Burundian refugee being held in a Toronto jail sparks renewed calls for less secrecy and more transparency within the Canada Border Services Agency.

By: Debra Black, Immigration Reporter,

http://www.thestar.com/news/immigration/2016/03/10/secrecy-cloaks-death-of-immigration-detainee-in-toronto-jail.html

A 64-year-old Burundian refugee, who was convicted of killing his wife in 2009, hanged himself at the Toronto East Detention Centre earlier this week as he awaited deportation, sources have told the Star.

It was the 13th death of an immigration detainee in Canada Border Services Agency custody since 2000. The death has sparked renewed calls for less secrecy and more transparency within the CBSA — as well as the creation of an oversight body to hold it to account.

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by Carmen Cheung and Samer Muscati

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/an-inexcusable-travesty-canada-sent-a-syrian-minor-to-solitary-confinement/article28781118/

In early January, Mohamed, a 16-year-old Syrian, arrived in Canada, alone. His parents had made a risky decision: They sent him to Canada in the hope of finding safety after learning that the country was accepting 25,000 Syrian refugees. A few weeks earlier, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was at Toronto’s main airport, personally greeting the first planeload of refugees. Mohamed’s reception by Canadian officials was a little different: The Canada Border Services Agency immediately apprehended and delivered him to the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre, where he was placed in isolation for three weeks.

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