Aracely saw Niagara Falls for the first time on a cold Monday in March as she crossed the Rainbow Bridge toward Canada with her common-law husband and two daughters aged four and 14, fleeing the immigration raids and sudden deportations sweeping across the U.S.
She said they felt happiness and hope as they walked across the bridge, using their cellphones to capture a cloud of mist and spray from the falls in the distance above the Niagara River, still caked in ice.
In a yellow envelope, Aracely carried documents she hoped would be the key to opening the gates to Canada for her family — birth certificates proving her relationship to her brother who is a Canadian citizen.
“We could see Canada, there, ahead, and behind us, the U.S.,” said Aracely, who is originally from El Salvador. “New opportunity, a new life.”
But Canadian border guards sent the family back to the U.S., where they entered a shadowy limbo — jailed in holding cells at the U.S. port of entry in Niagara Falls, N.Y., without a breath of outside air for nearly two weeks. She spoke with CBC News in Buffalo, N.Y., where she’s currently staying while awaiting a decision from immigration authorities.
CBC News is only identifying Aracely by her first name because she remains in a precarious situation in the U.S.
The Canada Border Services Agency’s handling of Aracely’s case and the family’s treatment by U.S. border authorities is raising renewed questions about the Safe Third Country Agreement between the two countries.
Under the agreement, refugee claims must be submitted in the country where people first arrive. For this reason, Canada turns away most asylum seekers who attempt to enter from the U.S. at land border crossings, but there are exceptions to this rule. One of them allows people to seek asylum if they have an anchor relative who is, among other categories, a Canadian citizen, a permanent resident or has an accepted refugee claim.
Asylum claims surge at Lacolle, Que., border crossing: CBSA data
The U.S. is the only place considered a “safe third country” by Canada. But some U.S. lawmakers say it’s no longer safe there for immigrants under President Donald Trump.
“The Trump administration has basically ended asylum in the United States,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat and member of the subcommittee on immigration and citizenship.
“It’s not a safe situation.”
Aracely and her common-law husband both lived undocumented for several years in the U.S. They decided to join family in Canada to escape the threat posed by the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies.
“We were living in fear,” she said.
So they took the risk of exposing themselves to U.S. immigration authorities by attempting to make a refugee claim in Canada.
However, the joy the family felt on March 17 at the Canadian port of entry in Niagara Falls, Ont., slowly turned to dread when an official with the Canada Borders Services Agency (CBSA) began reviewing Aracely’s documents.
She said the official seized on slight differences with their parents’ names in the documents — Aracely’s birth certificate listed her father with one last name, but on her brother’s document, he was listed with two last names. While their mother’s two last names matched on both records, there were variations on her first name, though each started with the same letter.
“They told me that the documents I presented did not convince them. I told them, ‘I have a brother in Canada and we can call him right now,’ ” said Aracely.
“But nothing could convince them not to deport us.”
She said border officials handed the family their backpacks and drove them back across the Rainbow Bridge. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) put them in a holding cell with cots, a couch and a television, where she said they stayed for three days. If they needed to use the bathroom, she said, they would have to bang on the door to be escorted to the facilities.
They were then moved to a windowless cell with four cots and a half wall that hid the toilet and sink at one end of the room. Aracely said she and her husband would wait until their daughters fell asleep before allowing themselves to cry.
“But we drew strength from our children. We did not want them to see us like that. We tried to be strong for them,” she said as she drew diagrams of the two cells on a notepad.
Family detention is a new and worrying trend along the northern border, according to U.S,.-based advocates.
Jennifer Connor, executive director of Justice for Migrant Families, in Buffalo, N.Y., said she’s received reports of children and families held for days and weeks at ports of entry in Detroit, Buffalo and Champlain, N.Y., located near the Quebec border. This is something that she says rarely, if ever, happened along the northern border, until Trump’s second term.
“There’s kids young enough to be in diapers and who are being locked up,” she said, adding that it can be difficult to locate people who have been detained at ports of entry because regulations are unclear.
“That element of randomness and cruelty really increased,” said Connor. “There is no system for finding people in a port of entry.”
According to a document outlining agency standards provided to CBC News by CBP, “detainees should generally not be held for longer than 72 hours in CBP hold rooms or holding facilities.”
The document said that “every effort must be made to hold detainees for the least amount of time.” In some cases, it noted that individuals are held longer if there is no space available at detention facilities.
Aracely said the days inside the cell were long and difficult. They would be fed frozen chicken sandwiches thawed by CBP officers in a microwave. Sometimes, she said, the meat would still be frozen at its centre, so they would eat around the edges. Water would come in a pitcher and sometimes they drank from the sink.
They had no access to shower facilities, but Aracely said they were provided use of a camping-style shower bag and each person got to use one bag of water.
She said they left the cell together three times during their two-week incarceration to walk in a hallway lined with windows.
“You could see the Canadian side, the Canadian flag,” she said.
Their four-year-old would get excited during these outings, which allowed her to run around and play with a ball. Aracely said she was the focus of their attention throughout their detention, and that their 14 year-old did her best to keep her sibling occupied, even as the teen turned inward and became more pensive.
At the little girl’s urging, they would sometimes play hide-and-seek in the cell, wrapping themselves in blankets made from material that reminded Aracely of the covers thrown over horses in El Salvador.
Then, on March 28, they received word that CBSA officials would meet with them again. There had been frantic work behind the scenes by their family to authenticate their records and enlist the help of a Canadian lawyer and advocates on both sides of the border.
“Again we walked across the bridge. We were feeling joy,” said Aracely. “We were feeling certainty.”
But any hope they had was soon dashed. CBSA officials again told the family they didn’t trust their documents. Aracely said it all happened very quickly.
“They told us we had to be deported immediately to the U.S., that they had been very generous in entertaining our case a second time,” she said.
One CBSA official told them it would be better if they were sent straight back to El Salvador, she said.
“[He] said the U.S. would deport us back to El Salvador anyway.”
The family returned to the cell at the Niagara Falls, N.Y., port of entry.
“I don’t think it’s something that Canada should be complicit in, turning children back to those kinds of conditions,” said Heather Neufeld, the family’s Ottawa based-lawyer.
She said CBSA officers had the option of calling Aracely’s brother, the anchor relative, and interviewing him, but chose not to.
“I’ve never seen a determination before that was so nitpicky on discrepancies,” she said.
“The [CBSA] border officials did not take the time to fully think out how things work in El Salvador, the fact that documents don’t always look the same as in Canada.”
Neufeld has filed for a judicial review of the CBSA rejection with the Federal Court, but the case is up against a ticking clock in the U.S.
On April 1, a CBP officer came to tell them that Aracely’s husband was being taken to a detention centre in Batavia, N.Y., before a deportation hearing scheduled for May. The family was given three minutes to say their goodbyes.
Aracely is currently living in a shelter in Buffalo with her daughters, and must check in weekly with immigration authorities. Her deportation hearing is scheduled for Christmas Eve.
“We’ve fled El Salvador, and then we’ve fled from here, from this uncertainty, to Canada,” she said.
“Now, our family is separated, just because they [CBSA] wouldn’t believe us. It seems really unjust. But we trust in God and soon, we’ll get through this process. Everything will come to the light that we were telling the truth.”
In a statement, CBSA said anyone turned away from Canada under the Safe Third Country Agreement enters into the “care of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”
