Close the Camps! No One Is Illegal on Stolen Land!

July 12, Matt Cohen Park at 11:30 – 12:30 Spadina and Bloor
No More Silence (NMS), Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), No One Is Illegal (NOII) and the Syria Solidarity Collective (SCC) call on you to meet at Matt Cohen Park (Bloor and Spadina), and then join us to bring our demands across the street to the office of Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs – we refute settler colonial governments authority in deciding who gets to stay on Indigenous lands.
We say close the camps right now and end all detention of migrants!

We’ve all seen the horrifying headlines… Babies ripped from their parents’ arms. Children sleeping on concrete floors in overcrowded cages. Reports of sick kids and no one being allowed to access and care for them. People fleeing violence only to be locked up indefinitely. We cannot stay complacent and let this happen.

And we know the Canadian government is not innocent in this. Canada is a settler colonial project built on genocide. The separation of Indigenous families and the removal of Indigenous children from their communities has been and continues to be a central component of national policy. These violences must end. Across Turtle Island, families belong together!

Like the US, Canada locks up asylum claimants and other immigrants. Conditions may be less dire than in Trump’s border camps, but detainees can still face detention in maximum security facilities, without charges or a trial sometimes indefinitely (unlike many nations there is no maximum period of time that Canada can hold immigration detainees). Canada is actually expanding its three main immigration detention facilities to hold more people and continues to hold people in maximum security provincial jails. Just last year as part of Trudeau’s vow to deport 10,000 people between November and March, the number of detentions increased. This expanded enforcement campaign will continue this fall. No one should be locked up

Furthermore, an outdated law called the “Safe Third Country Agreement” prevents most people fleeing violence or persecution from seeking refuge in Canada if they land in the US first [2]. As well, in March Trudeau’s government passed a new measure meaning that people who had already made an asylum claim in one of the other i5 countries (countries with an intelligence sharing agreement: Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and the United States) could no longer make a refugee claim in Canada. Rather than recognizing the danger facing poor, racialized, migrant, and other marginalized communities in the US, the Canadian government is instead talking to American lawmakers about broadening the ban even further [3]. Trump’s America isn’t safe. Let them in. Let them stay.


We demand that the Canadian government:
Condemn Trump’s separation of families and inhumane treatment of asylum seekers, and publicly call for the closure of the concentration camps on the US’s southern border
Scrap the Safe Third Country Agreement which refuses refugee claimants who enter Canada via the US, and allow people who have made an asylum claim in the US to make a refugee claim here.
End the unjust practice of immigration detention.

Bring your grief and your outrage. Join us as we bring these demands to the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Please share far and wide!
Kids are in concentration camps – don’t look away! Stand with us – we must do better!

We reject settler colonial borders! Refugees and their families are welcome on these lands!

Speakers to be confirmed [come back for updates!]