Immigration in Dangerous Times - "We had whistles, they had guns"

There was an interesting discussion in the the Comments to yesterday's post about immigration and its importance to Canada. So I thought I would look around for some recent discussions about immigration and its impact in Canada.

First, I hate to admit it, but I think our immigrant policies and practices are inextricably bound up now with what is now happening in Trump's America.
Canada cannot welcoming and kind to desperate people when our Safe Third Countries agreement forces us to send them back into the maelstrom that is now the United States.
And we cannot be reasonable and measured in reducing our immigration targets when landscapers and home care workers and waitresses are being labelled as vicious criminals in the United States and thrown into for-profit concentration camps, then flown to who-knows-where.
Its a crime against humanity.
Today the Toronto Star published an article by senior immigration reporter Nicholas Keung about a new Amnesty International report "We had whistles, they had guns". Its about what has been happening with the ICE Gestapo in the United States and whether Canada should continue the so-called Safe Third Party agreement.
Answers: yes, it's terrible, and no, we shouldn't.
Here is the article:
Trump’s ‘militarized’ immigration enforcement should make Canada reconsider if the U.S. is a safe country, critics argue The Amnesty International findings should have repercussions for how Canada admits refugees, experts say. [Gift Link]

...Amnesty International USA documented incidents where officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection and other federal agencies were alleged to have breached the rights of migrants, bystanders and protesters.
The accusations included unlawful killings, some of which Amnesty said may amount to extrajudicial executions; racial profiling; arbitrary and discriminatory arrest; “incommunicado detentions,” in some cases in conditions that it said may violate the prohibition on torture; unlawful surveillance; and violent repression of peaceful protests.
"They were neither isolated nor exceptional, but characteristic of the manner in which the operations were conducted and reflective of broader national patterns,” said the 137-page report, “We Had Whistles. They Had Guns,” released on Thursday.
The Trump administration has defended its enforcement operations as lawful and necessary, claiming to target only criminal aliens, gang members and those who are national security threats.
Stories of Canadians arrested and detained in U.S. have made headlines since Trump returned to the White House last year doubling down on immigration enforcement effort. The fear of being detained at the American border has contributed to the dramatic drop in Canadian travel to the U.S.
Critics say the Amnesty findings should prompt the Carney government to reconsider whether the U.S. still qualifies as a safe country for asylum seekers — a designation with implications for Canada’s refugee system.
The Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement requires claimants to seek protection in the first safe country they arrive in. Unless they qualify for exceptions, they are sent back to the other country. The bilateral pact is built on the principle that both countries are safe, and respect human rights and international protection obligations.
“This report makes abundantly clear what, frankly, everybody knows, which is the United States is not a safe country to seek and receive asylum,” said law professor Audrey Macklin, chair in international human rights at University of Toronto.
Canadians among those arrested and detained
Amnesty said ICE and CBP arrested more than 597,000 people between January 2025 and July 2026, up 41 per cent from the preceding 19-month period under the Biden administration. The number of people in detention reached an all-time high of 71,937 in January. Data tools developed by the Deportation Data Project showed there were 327 arrests with book-ins to ICE detention involving a Canadian citizen from January 2025 to July 2026.
At least 50 people have died in ICE custody while more than 605,000 people have been removed from the U.S., Amnesty said. More than 21,000 people have been deported to third countries, often without due process, it added.
The report said federal agents used excessive force when arresting people, including breaking down doors of homes without warrants and with guns drawn, conducting military-style raids in the middle of the night accompanied by Black Hawk helicopters, driving recklessly and boxing in vehicles, smashing car windows without justification, throwing people who were not resisting onto the ground.
The Amnesty report calls for ICE to be abolished. Neither ICE nor CBP responded to the Star’s requests for comment.
Macklin said the report highlighted “a discernible pattern” of rights violations directed at an objective rather than just exceptional acts, errors or negligence by individuals in isolation.
“Canada is not just an innocent bystander in observing what’s going on in the United States,” she explained. “Even less so is it entitled to clutch its pearls and feel morally superior, because Canada actually is implicated in harm that is being done to people in the United States who are asylum seekers or even people who are refugees. It does that by continuing to enforce the Safe Third Country Agreement.”
Amnesty’s research is based on testimonies from 154 people, as well as analysis of 29 videos and three photographs. The interviewees included migrants, their families, civil liberties groups and observers, focusing on the immigration raids in Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Washington, D.C.
Ottawa can’t delegate human rights obligations to the U.S.
Julia Sande, a lawyer with Amnesty International Canada, said what struck her the most was how entire communities are being terrorized.
“This behaviour not only was allowed to exist but was celebrated in many ways and encouraged, including by President Trump himself,” she noted. “It really demonstrates that when it comes to the rights of people who are in need of safety, we can’t just delegate our human rights obligations to the United States. It puts people directly in harm’s way.”
... the last review [of the agreement] was in 2022, before Trump returned to the White House.
The Immigration Department said the federal government uses a strong framework to continuously monitor U.S. developments and the impact that changes in policies and practices may have on the refugee protection system. This monitoring, it said, ensures the conditions required of the U.S. safe third country designation continue to be met.
“Designation as a Safe Third Country is continually assessed,” the department said in an email. “Canada has a proud humanitarian tradition and takes its international obligations regarding asylum seekers seriously.”

I hope we do. Because we need to stop sending innocent people back to American concentration camps.

This isn't surprising in the least.

Haitian immigrants are fleeing the U.S. into Canada to evade mass deportations following the termination of Temporary Protected Status. Migrants are crossing the northern border illegally through remote forests, exploiting a 14-day loophole to seek Canadian asylum.

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— Flingjore (@flingjore.com) September 23, 2026 at 7:42 PM

I hope we can welcome them. Here's a summary article in a news aggregator called The Week titled Canada becomes a safe haven for Haitians fleeing ICE

...Canada’s “asylum rules allow migrants with close family members to enter the country and seek protection,” said The Atlantic, and many have roots in the nation. There are about 100,000 people of Haitian descent living in Canada, according to the country’s 2021 census, a number that likely increased during the last five years. Even before the TPS revocation, Haitians were the largest group of asylum seekers in Canada; in Montreal alone, there are about 80,000 Haitians, “making them Montreal’s largest immigrant group.”
But Haitians “without close family members in Canada who arrive at the land border are generally ineligible to seek asylum,” so it is “difficult to predict how many Haitians may try crossing into Canada,” said The Atlantic. There have also been changes since the first Trump administration, when a “road from upstate New York to Montreal became a well-known crossing point,” said CNN. Since then, Canadian immigration rules have “changed significantly, and it’s much harder to make asylum claims at Canada’s border.”...

Next, I found a very good substack column by Hans Casteels riffing about Trump's latest anti-Canada anti-immigration post which I cannot bear to copy here but you've probably seen it anyway.
Casteels writes:

...There are legitimate arguments to be had about Canadian immigration. In fact, Canadians have been having them, because despite what our neighbour appears to believe, we have newspapers, Parliament, elections, Statistics Canada, provincial governments, economists and a population perfectly capable of bitching without foreign assistance. Immigration ran too high for the country’s ability to build housing, and expand infrastructure and public services. The federal government eventually acknowledged the problem and changed course. One can reasonably argue it should have done so earlier.
But “millions and millions” pouring across the border “essentially unchecked and unvetted” is something else entirely. It is the familiar Trumpian technique of taking an actual policy problem, feeding it steroids, dressing it in a cheap suit and sending it onto Truth Social to frighten the livestock. Canada’s current immigration plan sets 2026 permanent-resident admissions at 380,000 and new temporary-resident arrivals at 385,000. The government plans to reduce temporary residents to below five per cent of Canada’s population by the end of 2027. In 2025, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, arrivals of international students and temporary workers were 53 percent lower than in 2024.
You may think those numbers remain too high. You may think they are too low. You may think the Liberals made an almighty cock-up by allowing population growth to outrun housing construction, medical capacity and infrastructure. There is plenty there for Canadians to fight about over dinner. We do not need to pretend everything is wonderful simply because Donald Trump says it is terrible. Nationalism becomes particularly stupid when it requires lying to ourselves.
Canada is not perfect. Christ, no. We have a housing problem serious enough that young people increasingly regard home ownership as something their grandparents did, like smoking on airplanes. Our health-care system can produce world-class medicine after making you sit in a plastic chair long enough to qualify for archaeological status. Productivity has been weak. Governments announce things with considerably greater enthusiasm than they execute them. We have somehow constructed a country containing enormous quantities of energy, minerals, timber, farmland and educated people while occasionally behaving as though economic development is an embarrassing bodily function best performed behind a locked door.
We also have unemployment problems, affordability problems, infrastructure problems, Indigenous reconciliation that remains painfully unfinished, interprovincial trade barriers that should have embarrassed us into fixing them decades ago, and a political culture fully capable of producing its own home-grown bullshit. There. Nobody had to invade.
...Canada’s response to recent American pressure has increasingly involved diversification rather than waiting for Washington to become predictable again. The Carney government has been pursuing deeper European relationships and other trade arrangements, while political and business discussions about reducing Canada’s economic dependence on the United States have become far more serious. AP reported this week on precisely that strategic shift.
And perhaps this is where Trump has accidentally done Canada a favour, although I suspect he would be horrified by the thought. For most of my life in Canada, we have behaved like someone sleeping beside an elephant. We knew it was there. We knew it was enormous. We knew that if it rolled over suddenly, we would have a problem. But the elephant was usually friendly, enormously profitable to live beside and, frankly, quite comfortable. So we arranged the furniture accordingly. Then the elephant started rolling over. And Canadians woke up.
That may be the genuinely interesting story underneath all this noise. There is a growing conversation about what Canada wants to be twenty years from now rather than what it needs to do by Thursday afternoon to keep Washington happy. Energy corridors. Arctic sovereignty. Defence. Critical minerals. Internal trade. European partnerships. Asian markets. Ports. Pipelines. Infrastructure. Manufacturing. Productivity. The rather revolutionary Canadian idea that perhaps we should occasionally turn our astonishing collection of natural and human resources into an actual national strategy.
None of this guarantees success. Canada has an extraordinary ability to convert an urgent national priority into a federal-provincial working group followed by consultations, an environmental assessment, a website and eventually a commemorative PDF. Our capacity for administrative self-harm should never be underestimated. Still, something feels different.
The giant we slept beside was so large that eventually we stopped noticing its weight. American access became normal. American markets became normal. American defence became normal. American cultural dominance became normal. American political stability became something we simply assumed would continue. We organized ourselves around the giant and eventually mistook dependence for geography. Now the giant is shouting at us from Truth Social, threatening trade relationships, commenting on our domestic politics and explaining Canada to Canadians.
And Canada, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, is seriously asking what life would look like if the giant remained our neighbour without remaining our organizing principle....

Last year Canada updated its rules for determining citizenship by ancestry, and thousands are applying now: 

Since Trump returned, 250k+ Americans who qualify have applied for Canadian citizenship. Some moved here, but for most it’s a back-up plan.

— Kelly Miller (@sqirlgirly.bsky.social) September 23, 2026 at 9:05 AM

This is great:

I know it's a small percentage of people, but just to get this out there. IRCC seems to be waking up to the threat trans Americans face. No word that I've seen on accepting trans American asylum requests yet though... www.immiperts.com/canada-fast-...

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— Alyssa 🍁 (@alyssagambone.northsky.social) May 18, 2026 at 10:24 AM

Finally, Policy magazine this month has a useful article by Salma Siddiqui titled Beyond Multiculturalism: ‘Canadian’ as a Civic Identity

...Ottawa cannot expect national loyalty while treating persistent regional grievances as illegitimate, and provinces cannot expect federalism to work if every disagreement with the centre becomes evidence that the federation itself has failed.
A federation exists precisely because citizens and governments disagree. Its legitimacy depends on whether those disagreements can be contained within institutions that people regard as legitimate.
The Alberta debate illustrates this broader point: where political discontent reflects a desire to be heard by the centre, the question is not simply territorial loyalty but whether citizens continue to regard the political system as one in which they have meaningful standing.
There is a corresponding danger in multicultural politics: allowing grievance to become the dominant grammar of citizenship. Discrimination, historical injustice and regional inequality are real, and Indigenous claims rooted in treaties and constitutional rights cannot be dismissed in the name of cohesion. But a political system organized principally around competing claims for recognition can struggle to articulate a common interest.
If every group approaches the state primarily as a group seeking recognition or redress, politics can become a competition among identities. The question of what citizens owe one another becomes harder to answer.
A civic conception of multiculturalism does not require ignoring historical differences or pretending that all experiences are equivalent. It requires a framework in which different groups can pursue their interests while continuing to recognize one another as members of the same political community.
Canada’s demographic trajectory makes this increasingly important. Statistics Canada projects that immigrants could constitute between 29.1 and 34.0 percent of the population by 2041, making the country’s population more ethnoculturally diverse.
The Canadian identity of the future therefore cannot depend primarily on something people inherit. It has to be something people can enter. That points toward a civic conception of nationhood grounded in equality before the law, democratic institutions, individual rights, freedom of conscience and expression, political participation and reciprocal obligations.
These principles do not belong to one ethnicity or religion. They can be shared by someone whose family has been in Canada for eight generations and by someone who arrived eight months ago....

I also found some sources for more stories about immigrants and immigration generally: 

New Canadian Media describes itself as "the pulse of immigrant Canada" and has dozens of interesting articles about immigrant issues, experiences and advice.
Canadian Immigrant says it is "a national multimedia platform to help immigrants succeed in Canada by providing the information, inspiration and connections they need."

Both are worthwhile references.