4 racial profiling incidents in Canada that will shock you
and 6 things to do about them.
I.
On August 14, 2014, at 5am, 15 armed officers from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) along Ministry of Transportation and Ministry of Environment officials, Ontario Provincial Police Constables met up at a Toronto’s west end parking lot connected to a local Tim Hortons.
Over the next five hours, Ministry of Transportation officials waved down 16 seater vans, largely based on the presence of construction equipment. They were told they were being stopped for a commercial vehicle safety check. Once stopped, Border officers approached the cars, and coercively demanded IDs from both drivers and passengers in the cars.
By 9:30am, 21 men had been arrested for not having valid immigration documents. 6 had warrants for removal, at least 2 of whom were failed refugee claimants. Four others were migrant workers, who were arrested for working at an employer not listed on their permits.
Members of No One Is Illegal — Toronto (NOII) spoke to 4 of the 21 people arrested — all of them identified their skin colour, their lack of English speaking ability, and their construction clothes as the reasons they believed they were pulled over. They told NOII that border officers did not ask for identification from men that looked white or had Canadian accents.
NOII joined with other community groups to poster the targeted areas announcing these raids with links to a video about migrant rights. The following day protests were called at the offices of the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Transportation. With enormous mainstream media and public outcry, the Ministry of Transportation halted joint projects with the CBSA on August 29th (15 days later). On September 25th, the Ontario Ministry of Transportation officially cut ties with the Canada Border Services Agency accepting that these raids were an unjust and unacceptable use of provincial resources. No apology was given for the mass racial profiling.
This may sounds like a happy ending, but it isn’t.
II.
On September 25th, just a few hours after Ontario Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca’s announcement, Javier Meza and Alejandro Perez were returning home from work in Halton Hills, Ontario when a Ministry of Transportation van started tailing them near Highway 401 and Trafalgar.
They were followed in to their employer’s driveway, asked to return to the road and ordered to a nearby parking lot. Transportation officials took ID documents from Mr Perez who was driving and told them their vehicle was being inspected. According to the men, the transportation officer tricked them, and called Halton Regional Police. Police officers arrived, IDd the driver and passengers, and upon learning that they were undocumented, arrested them and handed them over to Border Enforcement. Eventually they were deported.
This is what Javier, a father of two, who had been living in Canada for six years, said about the incident:
“I was identified because of my orange shirt and for my Latino face, and because I was driving a truck. I am outraged as a Latino because they are stopping us and only us. What hurts me the most that people abuse undocumented people’s labour. My family and I have suffered a lot, many months of my wages were never paid to me.”
According to classified documents from the CBSA obtained by No One Is Illegal, the CBSA conducted 9 raids such as those in August 2014 in the entire year. We have no idea how many more such raids have taken place since or how many individual provincial officers are effectively moonlighting as border agents. At least two of the raids were in coordination with Toronto Police Services which has never cut ties with CBSA.
III
In fact, Toronto Police regularly racially profiles migrants. In a report published using Access To Information documents, NOII found that Toronto Police reported 3,278 people to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) between November 2014 and June 2015 — or approximately 100 every week. With its 3,278 calls, the TPS made more calls than the RCMP, and the police services of Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver combined.
Between November 2014 and 2015, less than 7.1% of those called about by the Toronto Police Services had outstanding immigration warrants. In fact, 83% of all calls were to perform a “status check” based on “suspicion” suggesting that TPS officers racially profiled the individuals, and chose to contact CBSA based on what the individuals looked like.
One of the people cited in the report is Jared, a mid-20s Toronto resident hailing from the Caribbean, and a father. When I visited Jared in the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre a few months ago, he told me that he was in the parking lot of his building when his cousin was shot in the leg in a drive by shooting. He called the ambulance, and went voluntarily to issue a statement to the Police. While there, Toronto Police asked for his name and date of birth, called immigration enforcement, and checked his immigration status. When they found out he was undocumented, they arrested him. He told me:
“I spent two and half months in the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre. I was on the verge of being deported. To tell you the truth if I could do it all over again, I would do it differently. I’ll never ever ever ever go to the police again, even for the smallest thing.”
We were able to get Jared counsel and have him released and we hope that soon he will have permanent residency. Most of the 100 people being called about by Toronto Police have no such recourse.
IV.
This one comes from Justicia for Migrant Workers.
On October 19, 2013, a violent sexual assault occurred in the Bayham, Ontario in the south west of Ontario. The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) were given the following description: a Black male with no facial hair, in his mid-to-late twenties, between 5’10 and 6’ tall, and with a muscular build.
Ontario Province Police officers went to migrant worker farms across the region. Workers were rounded up, told to go to a police cruiser, and were asked to sign a waiver and “voluntarily” provide a DNA sample at a nearby van. DNA was collected from over 100 workers in one morning.
Justicia for Migrant Workers spoke to 44 of these workers who ranged in age from 21 to 61, with heights from five feet to six-foot-five, weighing between 130 pounds and 310 pounds.
In effect, almost every black migrant worker that was approached was coerced into giving up their DNA.
Each of these incidents is systemic racial profiling. Here are 6 things we need to keep in mind about them.
(1) Racial profiling is one aspect of white supremacy, colonialism, racisms, particularly anti-Black racisms, homophobia, patriarchy and Islamophobia approached as such. When I speak here about immigration status and citizenship in the context of racial profiling, I do so in the context of centuries of colonialism on these stolen lands. I speak in the context of stolen labour of migrant workers, the forced impoverishment of the South that spurs migration, particularly impacting women, and the almost complete denial of labour rights and social services to migrant here which creates immense precariousness. This context weighs and defines the moment of racial profiling and arrest.
(2) We need to expand the definition and ways in which we speak about racial profiling. The Ontario Human Rights Act should include immigration status as an enumerated ground. The Ontario Human Rights Commission should include immigration status as part of its definition of racial profiling which currently reads:
(3) It is time to create Sanctuary Provinces. That is provinces as a whole across Canada cut ties with federal immigration enforcement, including the Police obviously, and ensure that all services are available to undocumented residents and migrant workers. Immigration status should not be used to exclude migrants from social protections.
(4) Policies are not enough, we need to move away from prisons and policing towards transformative justice alternatives outside of police and prison models. The Toronto Police Services have a Don’t Ask for immigration status policy so they follow it to the the letter by asking Immigration Enforcement and not migrants about their status. Similarly, even though the Ministry of Transportation cut ties with CBSA, individual officers are racially profiling men. We need to tackle racisms by individual officers that are built into the informal training protocols that exist outside the level of policy. That requires a complete new structural overview that begins by accepting that racisms are the norm, not the exception. It can’t be fixed by sensitivity trainings — we need an overhaul.
(5) Impact of the nexus of racism/racial profiling and immigration status must be detailed, studied and these stories shared. When a person is racially profiled by policing as many of us have, we face indignities, trauma, possibly jail or imprisonment, sometimes death. In almost all cases where an undocumented person or a precarious status person faces racial profiling, including carding, it means detentions — possibly indefinite detention — and deportations. It means sepration from friends and family, from economic opportunities and possibly death. We need to speak of the specific and immense impact of racial profiling on non status and precarious status migrants.
(6) We need much stronger accountability processes because of this immense impact. We need to shift away from an individual complaints based system as there are immense barriers to seeking justice. There is no voluntary consent possible for example in those farms with migrant workers where OPP collected DNA. Racially profiled non-status individuals often cannot be complainant because they are either in immense fear or already deported. We need a fundamentally different approach. This includes anonymous and third party complaints; creation of provincial Temporary Residence Permits connected to human rights complaints; a moratorium on deportations for complainants; and extremely severe repercussions for officers involved.
This is text of a talk I delivered at a recent provincial forum on racial profiling in Ontario organized by the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
