Implications of Trump’s mass deportations and immigration enforcement to Canada
An emboldened Trump administration will likely be more effective in border crackdowns and immigration enforcement, threatening a new wave of irregular migration to Canada — and a further shift to the right when it comes to immigration debates in Ottawa, experts warn.
On his first day back in the White House on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump made a series of sweeping changes that target undocumented migrants in his country and essentially shut down the border to asylum seekers.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has already taken a marked turn in his response to Trump’s second term, not just in rhetoric but also in action. In the last two years, Canada’s welcoming tone toward migrants has been replaced by reduced immigration intake partly in response to housing and cost-of-living pressures, and most recently, $1.3 billion was invested in border security and immigration integrity.
“When the first Trump administration did things like the Muslim ban, Canada was in a different place,” said Toronto immigration lawyer Gabriela Ramo, former chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s immigration law section. She was referring to Trudeau’s snipe at Trump, when he posted on social media at the time that “Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith.”
“My concern isn’t just that we’re going to get this influx but we are going to see more of the kind of policies we’ve been seeing lately in Canada, which are very much about closing the doors and battening down the hatches. What’s happening in the U.S. will continue to drive that rhetoric in Canada.”
During Trump’s first term in Washington, Canada saw a surge of irregular migrants crossing north by land to seek asylum here. The annual number of new refugee claimants surged from 23,855 in 2016 to more than 159,000 in 2024 (up to November). As of the end of 2024, there were 273,000 asylum seekers in the queue.
The executive actions and proclamations that Trump has made this week appear to be more comprehensive and carefully crafted, covering changes in detention to removal, refugee settlement, asylum processing and even citizenship as a birthright.
CNN has reported that the new executive actions were written “carefully and deliberately” to try to withstand expected legal challenges, a lesson that Trump learned from his previous term when his then hastily published orders were challenged in court, with some success.
What has also changed today, said Ramo, is there appear to be fewer safeguards in place to challenge these policy decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, is now solidly conservative after Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in his previous term.
“A lot of the institutional and people safeguards that kept him from his worst instincts, that’s gone,” she noted. “They’ve all been replaced with people who are total and complete ‘yes men’ for lack of a better word. Whatever he says, they’re going to do, because that’s how they’re going to maintain power, because he’s made it very clear that when you disagree with him, you pay the price.”
In 2023, during the Biden administration, Canada and the U.S. updated the Safe Third Country Agreement to essentially ban anyone crossing anywhere along the land border from making asylum claims in the other country. The initial ban had applied only at the official ports of entry and prompted irregular migrants to sneak through unguarded entry points such as Roxham Road in Quebec.
Despite the expanded asylum ban and Ottawa’s new border surveillance and enforcement effort to appease Trump — who has threatened crippling tariffs on Canadian goods — desperate migrants won’t be deterred because they are not going to return to the Global South, said immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges.
The removal of legal pathways for migrants to seek protection in the U.S. — suspending the refugee resettlement program and shutting down the app for migrants to make an appointment to legally enter the U.S. for asylum — won’t help, she noted.
“This is going to feed human smugglers and it’s going to make people take risks,” said Desloges. “More people are going to die when attempting these crossings.”
While it’s yet to be seen whether the White House can secure the funding to build 100,000 additional detention beds and how it will boost enforcement, refugee lawyer Adam Sadinsky said Trump’s rhetoric about the planned raids in major metropolitan areas and holding migrants in jail for the maximum time is enough to instil fear among migrants in the U.S.
“All of this language is used to make America look as inhospitable to refugees as possible,” said Sadinsky, a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers.
“Our government is maybe falling into the same sort of rhetoric that refugees are a burden and a problem and something we need to protect against rather than a population that we need to protect.”
There’s a provision in the revised Safe Third Country Agreement that allows irregular migrants to seek asylum in Canada or the U.S. if they managed to cross an unguarded land border and remain undetected for 14 days — a clause that Ottawa is said to want to remove from the deal, to tighten asylum eligibility and reduce refugee backlogs.
However, critics said it’s not a real solution because it would simply move the backlog from the refugee board to the Immigration Department, which would be required to assess if potential deportees are safe to be sent back to their country of origin or to the U.S. However, Ottawa announced just this week it will cut 3,300 immigration staff.
“We are going to see a cat-and-mouse game of epic proportions between asylum seekers trying to sneak in and border agents trying to keep them out,” said refugee lawyer Max Berger. “If scrapped, it will not deter asylum seekers from sneaking to avoid deportation from the U.S. … but just drive them further underground.”
On Tuesday, Public Safety Minister David McGuinty said that so far, Canada hasn’t seen any increase in the number of irregular migrants, but officials are monitoring it closely. He also cautioned that anyone considering crossing Canada’s border illegally would be putting themselves at risk.
“One of the messages we’re imparting to folks who are in the United States is it’s illegal to cross between border crossings,” he said. “It’s also unsafe.”
This article was first reported by The Star
