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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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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by Travis Lupick on December 16th, 2015

http://www.straight.com/news/598146/undocumented-immigrants-raise-alarm-border-cops-appear-enforcement-towards-years-end

A sizable community of Metro Vancouver residents is on alert this holiday season, fearing raids by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA).

In a telephone interview, Harsha Walia, an organizer with No One Is Illegal (NOII), reported that the organization has seen a sharp spike in calls from undocumented immigrants asking for assistance.

“We usually get three to five calls a week, and the last month we got probably close to double,” she said. “We are getting more calls from people who are in detention, more calls from people who had just been visited at their homes or workplaces with deportation orders.”

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by Travis Lupick

http://www.straight.com/news/614931/cbsa-enforcement-against-immigrants-rise-bc

Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) immigration-enforcement activities conducted in B.C. have intensified this year, an analysis of regional department data suggests.

CBSA recently supplied the Straight with statistics for the last two fiscal years (which run from April to March) plus the last nine months of 2015. Based on that data, the Straight estimates that CBSA Pacific region officers will have initiated 2,210 immigration investigations by March 31, 2016. That’s up from 1,843 during the previous fiscal year and 2,060 for 2013-14.

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During the week of July 20, 2015, several news sources, including Castanet Media, the CBC, HuffingtonPost, Vancouver Sun, and KelownaNow, published stories about four Mexican farmworkers who had not been seen since late June 2015.

We, the undersigned, are outraged at the sensational and overtly racist coverage of this ‘story’, which reinforces and perpetuates negative stereotypes of Mexicans as criminals. The inclusion of mug-shot like photos of two of the men in select articles, the emphasis on the men’s temporary and foreign statuses, as well as the statement that both Canadian Border Services Agency and U.S.Department of Homeland Security had been alerted (Castanet) to the situation “to track” (VancouverSun) the group, actively frame Mexican migrants as constituting security threats and public menaces to both Canada and the United States. Ultimately, the suggestion that these men may do something illegal, particularly when no criminal act hasbeen committed, reflects the racist biases of these news outlets.
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