A “day and night” protest spearheaded by hundreds of students who were defrauded into entering Canada and were sent deportation letters has finally paid off for them.
The Indian students will no longer be deported to their home country after they held sit-in protests in front of Ottawa’s detention centre. They had fallen prey to an immigration scam after spending thousands of dollars.
“I want to make it clear that international students who are not found to be involved in fraud will not face deportation,” said Canada’s Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRC) minister Sean Fraser.
“The Immigration Refugee Protection Act offers me discretionary authority which I believe should be exercised in the present context,” he said.
The minister said many of these international students “sincerely came to Canada to pursue their studies at some of our world-class institutions and were duped by bad actors who claimed to be helping them in their immigration application process”.
“Other foreign nationals had no intent of pursuing higher education, and used fraudulent acceptance letters to take advantage of Canada’s immigration system. Within this cohort of individuals, some have been involved in organised crime,” Mr Fraser said in a statement last week.
The undocumented students camped outside the Canada Border Services Agency’s (CBSA) headquarters in Mississauga for 18 days to protest against deportation letters sent to them by authorities in Canada, calling for investigations into the scams which led to their fraudulent immigration to the North American nation.
The international students, who had paid tens of thousands of dollars to an immigration consultant in India, were to be deported this week, but the step has been halted for now.
Problems surfaced when they were sent fake admission letters by their consultant in India and were served deportation letters, leaving them to arrange for lawyer fees and fight against getting rejected by the Justin Trudeau administration.
The students received the first wave of relief on Friday from Mr Fraser.
“After 18 days of protesting day and night in front of the CBSA headquarters in Mississauga, international students have secured an important win: the government is postponing all of their deportations until investigations into cases of misrepresentation are complete,” said a social media post shared by the protesting students of the Naujawan (Youth) Support Network.
However, the fight is far from over for the protesting students, it said.
“The deportations have only been postponed temporarily. The government could try to deport some of the students after the investigations are complete,” the post read.
“If that happens, the students and community have vowed to restart this morcha [movement] and maintain it until the deportations are permanently cancelled,” it added.
