TeleSur | – –
As the U.S. looks to tighten its policies on refugees and illegal immigrants, people seeking refugee status have been pouring over the Canada-U.S. border.
Eight asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.
As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, New York, four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.
One by one they scrambled across the snowy gully separating the two countries. RCMP officers watching from the other side helped them up, lifting the younger children and asking a woman, who leaned on her fellow passenger as she walked, if she needed medical care.
The children looked back from where they had come as the U.S. officer held the first man, saying his papers needed to be verified.
The man turned to a pile of belongings and heaved pieces of luggage two at a time into the gully — enormous wheeled suitcases, plastic shopping bags, a black backpack.
“Nobody cares about us,” he told journalists. He said they were all from Sudan and had been living and working in Delaware for two years.
People seeking refugee status have been pouring over the Canada-U.S. border as the United States looks to tighten its policies on refugees and illegal immigrants. Asylum-seekers sneak across because even if they are caught, they can make a claim in Canada; if they make a claim at a border crossing, they are turned away.
Via TeleSur
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Related video added by Juan Cole:
CGTN: “Syrian family detained in Canada after illegally crossing border”
– This is an unmitigated shame.
. Not certain this story is correct; the US Border Patrol wished to keep the Somali’s in the US? Somehow I kind of doubt that š
@Chip Pitfield: This is exactly what our Canadian press is reporting, with photos.
link to shawglobalnews.files.wordpress.com
The U.S. thugs did not want to “keep the Somali’s in the U.S.”; they would have sent them back to Somalia.
I grew up and was educated in the U.S. but 40 years ago, I left for a professional opportunity (as a certified translator) in Canada. While in the U.S., I Iived through the civil rights struggle and the Viet-Nam war. I experienced or read about some really bad actions by the government, but I never expected to live to see what’s going on now.
The Electoral College has put a malignant and delusional narcissist in power. The world is watching and is frightened by what they see.
Perhaps the time has come to put the Statue of Liberty in the the Smithsonian Museum with a sign quoting John Greenleaf Whittier: āFor all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.ā