From Solidarity Across Borders
While our comrades in the so-called United States are gaining well-deserved traction for their resistance against ICE, Solidarity Across Borders (SAB) wants to highlight the atrocities committed by the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA).
Violent border control is inherent to genocidal settler colonies like the United States and Canada. While it might be tempting to convince ourselves that Canada is an exception to brutal state-sanctioned violence against migrants, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Our very own “made in Canada” Border Services Agency also detains children with their families, arrests people in front of their children, violently barges into their homes at night, injures them during arrests and refuses to provide them with medical care, enters hospitals to detain people and handcuffs them to their bed, and brutalizes them with impunity. Yet the myth of Canadian exceptionalism paints Canada as a tolerant and welcoming country.
While a lot of outrage has been (deservedly) directed at Garda for collaborating with ICE in US detention centers, it is worth noting that Garda guards have been contracted at the Laval Immigration Holding Center and have oppressed our comrades who were detained for several years now. Garda guards have consistently refused SAB members from bringing essential items such as toothbrushes and shampoo for our comrades on the inside and have proudly exhibited “thin red line” (CBSA’s version of the thin blue line for Blue Lives Matter) pins on their vests.
It would be hypocritical for us to point at the United States’ cruel treatment of migrants while allowing ourselves to be blinded by the illusion that Canada is somehow better.
No matter who operates the detention centers and no matter in which country they are located, borders and immigration detention have always been death machines. Garda is just a symptom of the problem; the real problem is that borders exist at all.
As we mobilize in solidarity with our neighbors, we must not forget resistance here is also crucial. Under the Safe Third Country Agreement, Canada has refused entry to thousands of people and deported thousands more to the countries they fled, despite knowing full well that their lives were endangered. Bill C-12, which is currently in front of the Senate, would only further close the border, so that virtually no one coming from the United States will be able to make a refugee claim.
It is urgent that we gain an understanding of our own brutal border control regime so that we may mobilize in solidarity with ALL undocumented migrants and migrants with temporary and precarious status in Canada.