Migrant Dignity Not Migrant Death: National Actions Against CBSA Enforcement
* Marking 2-month anniversary of Lucia Vega Jimenez’s death
* Honouring 5-months of historic migrant strike in Linsday detention
* Solidarity with Awan family in Sanctuary for 6 months
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Join us for a creative action!
February 28, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Downtown Vancouver Public Library
(Robson and Homer)
Coast Salish Territories
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In Toronto:
http://
From the historic strike waged by detained migrants to denounce their conditions at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario, to the tragedies of Lucia Vega Jimenez and the Wajli family, to the courageous decision of families like the Awan and Figueroa family to take sanctuary behind confined walls, migrants across the country are finding themselves in situations of tremendous precarity, sometimes even resorting to death rather than facing detention and deportation.
February 28 marks the two-month anniversary of the death of Lucia Vega Jimenez’s while under CBSA custody. Lucia attempted suicide while in immigration enforcement custody awaiting deportation. She died 8 days later on December 28, 2013. CBSA kept her death a secret, and to date neither a full coroner’s inquest nor an independent investigation has been ordered. Over the past five years there have been a number of migrant deaths in detention, while awaiting deportation, or upon deportation. These include Jan Szamko, Habtom Kibreab, Walji family, Hossein Blujani, Lucia Vega Jimenez, Grise, and Veronica Castro.
February also marks the five-month anniversary of the historic migrant strike in Lindsay Ontario against endless detentions and maximum security incarceration. Striking migrants have faced reprisals with many deported, locked-up in segregation, moved to other prisons, and denied access to legal counsel. Since 2004, there have been 8,838-14,362 migrant detentions per year in Canada. Over a third of these, like the detainees in Lindsay, are held in maximum-security provincial prisons. Canada is one of the only ‘Western’ countries to indefinitely detain people. This means that some immigration detainees have been unjustly locked away, without charge, for nearly ten years.
On February 27th, it will have been six months that Khurshid Begum Awan took sanctuary in a Montreal church. In August 2013, she made the courageous decision to defy a removal order which would have seen her returned to Pakistan, where she faces targeted violence, lack of access to appropriate medical care, and indefinite separation from her daughter and grandson, who live in Montreal. The practice of sanctuary  represents community resistance to violent and unjust immigration laws.
Canadian immigration policies and the practices of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), a notoriously secretive organization with no independent public body of oversight, are responsible for the breaking up of thousands of families, the unjust imprisonment of thousands of migrants, and for forcing families including children and elders into hiding or sanctuary to avoid deportation.
Join us on February 28th as we honour and amplify the voices of migrants and recount the all too common life stories that are marked by violent detentions and deportations as a result of unjust migration policies.
* Sign the petition to support an end to indefinite immigration detention: https://www.change.org/en-CA/
* Sign the petition to support an independent civilian inquiry into Lucia Vega Jimenez’s death: www.change.org/lucia
* For more information on the detention of migrants in Canada, see https://noii-van.resist.
