On his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump declared war on migrants.
That might seem like hyperbole, but it’s barely an exaggeration—in one of the many anti-immigrant executive orders he signed on day one, he officially declared that irregular migration to the U.S. is an “invasion” and assumed wartime presidential powers to stop it, including the unprecedented move of deploying the military on U.S. soil to “secure complete operational control” of the border.
Trump plans to build a massive machine of surveillance and repression in the United States to root out migrants, including stripping migrants of legally acquired citizenship. He plans to send millions of U.S. residents to countries across the world, some of whom have not seen “their” country since they were children, in order to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations.
The situation is bleak, and Canada has responsibilities—both moral and legal—to act. The first thing it should do is immediately withdraw from the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States.
An agreement that never made sense
The Safe Third Country Agreement is a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Canada, which was signed in 2002 and went into effect in 2004. It regulates refugee claims between the two countries. According to the terms of the agreement, a migrant applying for refugee status must do so in the first “safe” country that they arrive in.
That means, for example, a migrant arriving from Haiti via Mexico cannot cross through the United States and then apply for asylum in Canada. Because the hypothetical migrant arrived in the United States first—and the U.S. is designated as a “safe country” by the terms of the agreement—they must apply for refugee status in the United States. The same would apply to a migrant who arrives in Canada first—they cannot then apply for refugee status in the U.S.
The initial agreement only covered official points of entry, such as land border crossings, airports, and marine ports. It did not cover the vast majority of the U.S.-Canada border. So when Trump first took office in 2017 and began to implement his anti-immigrant vision, migrants began fleeing to Canada through irregular crossing points.
The most famous of those crossings was at Roxham Road. Located between Champlain, New York, and Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Quebec, Roxham Road became the site where migrants fleeing deportation in the U.S. would arrive and cross into Canada. Because Roxham was not an official point of entry, it allowed migrants to legally apply for refugee status in Canada despite having previously been in the “safe country”—the U.S.
Between 2017 and 2023, around 100,000 people crossed the border at Roxham Road to apply for asylum—over 90 per cent of the total of irregular crossings into Canada.
In 2023, during then U.S. President Joe Biden’s first official visit to Canada, he and Trudeau announced that they had renegotiated the Safe Third Country Agreement. Now it would apply to the entire border, not just official points of entry. Roxham Road was closed—and so was a key legal path to asylum in Canada for migrants fleeing the U.S.
Time to withdraw
Back in 2007, a judicial review of the Safe Third Country Agreement—triggered by Amnesty International, the Canadian Council of Refugees, and other human rights groups—found that the agreement was unconstitutional and failed to live up to Canada’s obligations under international law to protect the rights of refugees. It found, in short, that the United States could not reasonably be considered a “safe country” for refugees due to its non-compliance with the Refugee Convention and the Convention Against Torture.
The decision was overturned by an appeals court on procedural grounds—but even in the overturning decision, the court did not find that the U.S. was a “safe country.”
That was 2008, years before Trump became the dominant figure in American politics by stoking anti-immigrant hate. Today, the immigration environment in the United States is significantly worse.
One of Trump’s day-one decrees was to completely suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), the program through which all refugee claimants must pass to enter the United States, for 90 days “pending review.” If the program comes back at all, it will likely be significantly more restrictive. Trump also suspended access to section 208 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which allows for asylum claims.
It appears that, for now, there is essentially no way to make a legal refugee claim in the United States of America. The idea that such a place can be considered a “safe country” for refugees in this context is completely and obviously absurd.
Canada, though, continues to maintain this fiction as a signatory to the Safe Third Country Agreement. Pretending that the U.S. is a safe country means that Canada continues to lock out asylum seekers who have legitimate fears of persecution in their home country—and, increasingly, in the United States itself.
America’s Department of Homeland Security has been given a mandate to use “all legally available resources” to construct detention centres for migrants, and America’s federal government is setting up task forces in every state to manage the mass deportation of millions of people. The president of the United States has expressed plans—some of which are blatantly unconstitutional—to strip legally acquired citizenships. It would be reasonable to interpret the U.S.’ war on migrants as a form of persecution in itself.
If Trump actually does even half the things he has promised to do to migrants in the United States, it will trigger a humanitarian crisis—and Canada has the responsibility to act to protect people fleeing persecution.
A moral and legal obligation
When governments attempt to close migration routes, migration doesn’t stop—it just moves to more dangerous areas. When the U.S. “closed” the border with Mexico in the 1990s, more migrants moved into the dangerous terrain of the southwest desert. When Europe “closed” land migration routes coming from Turkey and elsewhere, more migrants chose to take the perilous journey across the Mediterranean in small and crowded boats.
In the past 10 years, over 31,000 migrants have “gone missing” in the Mediterranean while attempting to cross into Europe. Another 10,000 are “missing” along migration routes in the Americas during that same period, with the majority of those deaths being in the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Canada has largely been insulated from these waves due to geography. It only shares a single land border with a country that it designates as a “safe country” for refugees, justifying a blanket refusal of asylum claims. But what happens when that country is no longer safe?
Like most countries, Canada is a signatory to the Convention on the Status of Refugees, an international agreement that outlines the legal responsibilities signatories carry towards asylum seekers. The convention is clear—refugees have a right to asylum from persecution, and they have the right to access such asylum even if they enter a country irregularly.
But the most important arguments in favour of scrapping the Safe Third Country Agreement aren’t legal—they’re moral. Do we, as a country, want to bear the weight of thousands more migrants dying while searching for lives of dignity?
During the Holocaust, a high-level Canadian government official—likely either Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King or his immigration minister—was asked how many Jews Canada should admit to the country as they fled Nazi persecution. They responded by saying that “none is too many.”
Let’s not say the same thing to refugees today.