Toronto (Reuters) – Canadian police and immigrant aid groups are bracing for a large influx of asylum seekers wanting to flee the United States with the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, as Canada grapples with record numbers of applicants and is trying to bring in fewer immigrants.
The future US president won the presidential election this week, in part by promising to carry out the largest deportation of immigrants in the country’s history.
Canadian police have been preparing for months, Sergeant Charles Poirier of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Thursday.
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“We knew a few months ago that we had to start preparing a contingency plan because if he came to power, which will happen in a few months, it could lead to illegal immigration and irregular immigration into (the province of) Quebec and into the Canada,” he told Reuters.
“In the worst case scenario, people would cross in large numbers across the entire territory. … Let’s say we had 100 people a day crossing the border, then it would be difficult because our officers would basically have to cover huge distances to arrest everyone.”
When Trump first assumed the presidency in 2017, thousands of asylum seekers crossed into Canada between formal border crossings to file asylum claims — mostly on Roxham Road, near the Quebec-New York border.
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Roxham Road is no longer an option: Canada and the US have expanded a bilateral agreement so that now asylum seekers who try to cross anywhere along the 4,000-mile border, rather than just at formal crossings, are turned away unless meet a restricted exemption.
That means people crossing the U.S. border to file asylum claims must cross undetected and hide for two weeks before claiming asylum — a potentially dangerous prospect, immigrant advocates say.
But they add that people are already doing this. “When you don’t create legitimate pathways, or when you only create pathways where people have to do the impossible to get to safety, unfortunately, people will try to do the impossible,” said Abdulla Daoud, director of The Refugee Center in Montreal.
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And those numbers are expected to increase.
Police are on “high alert,” Poirier said, prepared to mobilize additional resources to patrol the border. Depending on what happens, that could mean hundreds of more police officers. It could also mean more vehicles, chartering buses, building trailers and renting land.
“All eyes are on the border now. … I can tell you that we were on high alert a few days before the election and will probably continue to be on high alert in the coming weeks.”
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