– CORRECTED location below, please resend this notice if you have previously forwarded it –

For almost one month now, 492 Tamil refugees have been detained by Canadian authorities. Families have been seperated, and women and children – including young children – are being incarcerated in Burnaby. Join No One is Illegal-Vancouver at the Burnaby detention facility to express our love, support, and solidarity to those being held inside and to call for the immediate release of detained Tamil asylum seekers.

Saturday Sept 11 at 1:30 pm. Burnaby Youth Custody Services Centre where mothers and children who arrived aboard MV Sun Sea are being detained. LOCATION: 7900 Fraser Park Dr, Burnaby

» click here to continue reading

The Australian, September 01, 2010 11:31AM

Video here

POLICE are searching a group of Afghan asylum-seekers who broke out of Darwin detention centre to stage a protest as they fear they may be carrying weapons. Dozens of Afghan asylum seekers who say their refugee claims were recently rejected broke out of the facility early this morning and are protesting beside the Stuart Highway. Police are at the scene trying to convince the men, engaged in what authorities are calling a peaceful protest, to return to the centre. “Some of you may have weapons – we do not know,” a police negotiator said.

» click here to continue reading

* For PHOTOS from across the country (courtesy NOII groups, VMC, AW@L): http://www.flickr.com/photos/nooneisillegal/

On Saturday August 21st, close to 250 people gathered at the Vancouver Art Gallery on Coast Salish Territories as part of a National Day of Action to demand the release of detained Tamil asylum seekers and an end to racist and restrictive refugee policies. The march opened with a traditional opening as Indigenous Elders welcomed the Tamil asylum seekers to their territories and condemned the government and Jason Kenney. Speakers underscored the history of racist exclusion in Canadian immigration policy, the daily violence of detentions and deportations justified under the guise of ‘criminality’ and ‘security threats’, the commodification of migrants as exploitable labour in order to be deemed worthy, and how the hollow rhetoric of multiculturalism and inclusion unravels every time a boat of migrants challenges the Canadian state and its fortified border.

» click here to continue reading

Why this mean-spirited furore over a few Tamils? Perhaps it’s because they aren’t white
By Stephen Hume, Vancouver Sun August 21, 2010

Another refugee ship arrives on Canada’s shores — carrying Tamil refugees fleeing a country scarred by decades of grisly atrocities, on both sides of a protracted civil war — and once again there erupts a mean-spirited fury worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge. There are demands that the refugees be arbitrarily refused the right to land; that they be given food and sent back to whatever fate awaits them; that their ship should have been intercepted on the high seas; that they be diverted to other countries in South Asia, as if Pakistan with 14 million internal refugees from floods or Afghanistan, the world’s leading source of asylum-seekers at the moment, were in any position to help.

» click here to continue reading

By No One Is Illegal-Vancouver | August 20, 2010, rabble.ca

Surviving a dangerous three-month ocean journey, 492 Tamil refugees — including around 60 women and 55 children — arrived in B.C. after fleeing war and persecution in Sri Lanka. When the ship the MV Sun Sea first neared Esquimault on Vancouver Island, the territories of the Songhees First Nation, it was immediately boarded by the Canadian armed forces, border services, and RCMP. As of Wednesday, initial hearings had been completed for about 100 of the migrants. All were ordered to be re-incarcerated in the Fraser Correctional centres and Burnaby Youth detention centre, while officials are confirming their identities. It has been revealed that after seizing the belonging of the migrants into two large U-Hauls, Canadian Border Services Agency failed to keep records to tag the belongings and documents to each individual. This is causing an unnecessary and oppressive delay, and is even more objectionable since same thing happened to the Tamil refugees who arrived last fall on the ship Ocean Lady.

» click here to continue reading