Bookkeeper Zulema Diaz fled her native Peru after being kidnapped, beaten and robbed, hoping to find safety in the United States. Instead, she said she experienced homelessness and sexual harassment when she unofficially worked on a hospital cleaning crew.
So when Diaz, 46, heard that New York City was handing out free bus tickets, she said she hopped on a bus to Plattsburgh, a town close to the Canadian border, and then took a cab to the irregular border crossing at Roxham Road to enter Canada. come and apply for asylum.
A surge in asylum seekers entering Canada through unofficial border crossings — many of whose bus fares were paid for by New York City and aid agencies — is increasing pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reach an agreement with President Joe Biden to close the entire land border to most asylum seekers.
Canadian Immigration Minister Sean Fraser met with US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in Washington DC this week. Trudeau has said he will raise the issue when Biden visits Ottawa on March 23 and 24.
Many of the arrivals have abandoned plans to seek asylum in the United States, daunted by the long processing times and restrictive definitions for asylum, according to aid workers and interviews with asylum seekers.
On a snowy day in late February, about three dozen asylum seekers, some with suitcases, others with backpacks, trudged down a snowy trail from upstate New York to Quebec.
For Diaz, the city’s payment for the roughly $150 ride to Plattsburgh was added impetus to a decision she’d been considering for months.
“This came as a miracle,” she said. After arriving in the US in June last year, she was given a date of January 2024 to appear in US immigration court.
“I felt protected in the United States, it just takes a long time to process the documents.”
Since 2007, New York City has been providing bus and airline tickets to homeless people who can demonstrate a source of support in other cities and countries. Refugee aid groups began offering free bus tickets to migrants in August last year, but said they stopped doing so in November over cost concerns. New York City said it began its effort in September.
The office of New York City Mayor Eric Adams would not say how many tickets the city and collaborating charities have bought for migrants. Reuters solicited comments from the mayor’s spokespersons Kate Smart and Fabien Levy, the mayor’s Immigration Department, the Homeless Department and SLSCO, the ticket distribution contractor.
Smart said that migrants themselves choose their destination.
“To be clear, New York City has not sent people to Canada,” Smart said. “We want to help asylum seekers stabilize their lives, whether in New York City or elsewhere.”
The US Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on processing times in the US asylum system. The Biden administration has called on Congress to review immigration laws.
Nearly 40,000 asylum seekers entered Canada through illegal border crossings from the United States last year — nine times more than in 2021 when pandemic restrictions were still in place, and more than double the nearly 17,000 who crossed the border in 2019. Nearly 5,000 arrived in January alone, according to the most recent figures from the Canadian government.
Canada accepted more than 46% of irregular asylum applications in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, according to Canadian government data. US immigration courts approved 14% of asylum applications during the same period, according to US government data.
At the end of last year, Canada had more than 70,000 refugee applications pending. In the United States, approximately 788,000 asylum cases were pending in the US immigration court.
Nigerian, Haitian and Colombian nationals accounted for nearly half of Canada’s irregular applications, according to previously unreported data from the Immigration and Refugee Board.
PEOPLE ARE DISCOURAGED
While the Safe Third Country Agreement allows US and Canadian officials to return asylum seekers both ways at formal ports of entry, this does not apply to unofficial crossings such as Roxham Road.
A Canadian government official, who was not allowed to speak officially, told Reuters that the US has little incentive to extend the agreement to the entire 4,000-mile border.
According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, asylum seekers in the United States wait on average more than four years to appear in immigration court. According to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, it takes at least six months after submitting a refugee application to get a work permit.
“People are discouraged by the long, long time it takes them to get work papers and asylum hearings,” said Ilze Thielmann, director of Team TLC NYC, which helps migrants arriving in New York.
In Canada, the average processing time for refugee applications was 25 months in the first 10 months of 2022. That’s more than the 15 months of 2019, according to the Immigration and Refugee Board.
Raymond Theriault, 47, said he left his home in the Nicaraguan mining town of Bonanza to contact family in Canada, where he believes his late father was born.
Theriault said he struggled to find steady work and local officials prevented him from opening a small seafood restaurant after he criticized the government.
After entering the US at El Paso in November, last month he visited a daughter in West Virginia entering Canada at Roxham Road. In New York City, he paid $140 for a bus ticket to Plattsburgh.
Now in a government-funded hotel in Niagara Falls, he says he’s happy with his decision to go to Canada.
“There’s more support, they’re more humanitarian,” he said. “In the United States … if you starve to death, that’s your problem.”
The Quebec government has said the surge in asylum seekers is straining its capacity to house people and provide basic services. The federal government said it has transferred more than 5,500 asylum seekers to other provinces since June, the first time it has done so.
In his office in downtown Montreal, refugee lawyer Pierre-Luc Bouchard said he has never been so busy.
“I have limited resources. I can’t hire everyone,” he said. “My staff gets tired of saying ‘no’.”
RISING NUMBERS IN BOTH DIRECTIONS
Illegal crossing to the United States is also on the rise.
U.S. Border Patrol said it has apprehended more than 2,200 people crossing between ports of entry in the four months since October, nearly as many as in all of fiscal year 2022. The force said it deployed an additional 25 officers to the stretch of border which includes Champlain, New York, where most of the migrants have been apprehended.
Immigration experts say closing the border to asylum seekers could push migrants to take even riskier routes. Last year, an Indian family of four froze to death in the Canadian province of Manitoba as they tried to cross the border into the United States.
“You’re going to see people start making more risky and dangerous choices and more tragedies will happen,” said Jamie Chai Yun Liew, a professor of immigration law at the University of Ottawa.
