For more than a week now, people detained by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) at the brand new Immigration Holding Center (CSIL) have been on hunger strike to protest against the arbitrary nature and unjust of their detention.
On Thursday, there were around thirty of them holding on, within the walls of this supposedly friendlier and more humane detention establishment, inaugurated last October.
It was discussed in these pages last Friday. In the testimonies collected by The dutysome strikers reported having been placed in detention several months ago already, for reasons that seem completely exaggerated, and without knowing the precise date of return to their country of origin.
The CBSA generally detains people in an irregular situation for three reasons: the risk of flight, the impossibility of confirming the identity of the person or the (presumed) dangerousness of the individual. However, these criteria are often applied in a broad and arbitrary manner, depriving of their liberty people who could very well have, for example, been subjected to surveillance measures while remaining in the community.
This hunger strike reminds us that the “administrative detention” of people in an irregular migratory situation is a crude euphemism which serves to give a veneer of legitimacy to the CBSA’s strictly carceral practices.
In detention centers like the CSIL, transportation is carried out with handcuffs on the feet and hands, schedules are regulated like a penitentiary, solitary confinement is used – frequently used, testimonies report – to “manage” people in distress.
It is no coincidence that the CBSA has long entered into agreements with the provinces to detain people apprehended in provincial prisons: immigration detention is incarceration in the full sense of the term. Between 2015 and 2020, on average, 2,000 people per year would have been imprisoned across Canada.
It is often said that this practice is aberrant because it allows people “who have committed no crime” to be sent to prison. I believe that this rhetoric of innocence serves no one. Above all, it serves to justify the generalized disregard for the rights of people who have indeed committed a criminal offense. It also serves to cultivate suspicion, suggesting that if the migrants who are imprisoned do not show credentials, perhaps they ultimately deserve to be detained.
It should rather be emphasized that people detained for immigration purposes do not benefit from the same rights and guarantees of procedural fairness as other incarcerated people and that in this sense, their detention is doubly unjust — both in a detention center the CBSA than in a prison. They are subject to the discretionary power available to the CBSA, they can be perpetually detained without a clear reason…
In 2022, British Columbia and Nova Scotia announced they would stop detaining people in provincial jails on behalf of the CBSA. Last June, Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick followed suit. This is definite progress. On the other hand, the testimonies from the CSIL clearly show that we still tolerate, on the territory of Quebec, the existence of an exceptional prison regime which applies to migrants.
In October 2022, at the opening of the new CSIL, the CBSA declared in a press release that it was committed, through this project, to “improving the immigration detention system in a more humane and fair while respecting public safety.
Large windows, beautiful recreational spaces, carefully chosen vocabulary to mask the carceral nature of the institution — no effort was spared to sugarcoat the pill.
Despite everything, shortly after the center opened, Pivot reported that detention conditions were worse than in the old establishment: increased surveillance, tight movement controls, restricted visits and subject to laborious procedures. A prison remains a prison. No matter how we sugarcoat it, the opening of this center, whose detention capacity has been increased, has in no way “humanized” immigration detention. On the contrary, it represents a clear expansion of the carceral logic that guides the management of immigration in Canada.
Every time we talk about making the detention of migrants “more humane”, we forget to question the very legitimacy of a practice which is by no means inevitable. This practice is justified by nothing other than ideology: that of the migratory peril, which poses the figure of the migrant as a threat, and relegates to subhumanity people who do not have access to the luxury of transnational mobility.
The ongoing CSIL hunger strike must certainly result in short-term gains, to rectify clear legal violations here and now, in specific cases. However, in the longer term, it must be emphasized that the only humane way to reform immigration detention is to abolish it, and replace it with a regularization program for all.
Columnist specializing in justice issues environmentalist, Aurélie Lanctôt is a doctoral student in law at McGill University.