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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Hugh Adami – Ottawa Citizen

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/tears-of-joy-greet-little-daksh-sood-as-he-is-finally-reunited-with-parents-in-ottawa

Bhavna Bajaj waited three years for the moment, and when it finally arrived Thursday afternoon at Ottawa International Airport, the sheer joy of having her little boy in her arms brought the perfect ending to a long heartbreak.

Bajaj says there were tears, laughter, hugs and kisses after she was taken from the general arrivals area to the closed-off Customs section to greet her four-year-old son, Daksh Sood, who had just stepped off a plane with his father, Aman Sood. Sood travelled to India in early December to visit his son, whom he had not seen since they were separated. While in India, Sood could not have imagined the developments that would come just before Christmas, involving Immigration Minister John McCallum, that allowed the boy to be reunited with his parents in Canada.

What was a long, unnecessary and inhumane separation, first reported by The Public Citizen on Dec. 26, 2014, stemmed from the couple’s failure to disclose they had a son before they landed in Montreal on Jan. 28, 2013. Daksh was born before their initial application for permanent residency. The couple, approved as permanent residents under the skilled workers category after the boy was born, had left Daksh behind in India with his paternal grandparents and had planned to sponsor him once they were settled here. It turned into a nightmare.

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Dear Marie-Jolie Rwigema, Diana Uwase Sauter, concerned members of Vancouver’s Rwandan community, as well as Elleni Centime Zeleke, Delice Mugabo and Hawa Y. Mire,

As indicated in our last email, we were in the process of writing a further apology. Since then we have also received the additional open letter. This is our further apology to our first and also a response to the open letter from December 15th addressed to NOII and supporters. » click here to continue reading