On Nov. 6, 2025, Quebec Minister of Immigration Jean-François Roberge abolished the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), a program designed to help foreign students and workers obtain Canadian citizenship. This abolition erases the progress of those in this program, forcing them to seek different paths to citizenship. This measure is one of many that the government of Quebec has implemented in recent years to limit migration to the province, reflecting a broader trend throughout Canada to lock down on immigration while completely uprooting thousands of migrants’ lives.
Over the past sixty years, controversy around immigration in the political realm continues to increase dramatically. In 1971, Canada announced its commitment to multiculturalism; in 1972, Richard Swanson was celebrated as the 10 millionth immigrant since confederation. Economically, immigration was applauded and appreciated, but in the early 1980s, migration entered Western politics as a highly debated issue following increasing worries with work and housing insecurity. As a result, politicians in election season focused on appeasing their electorate rather than on undocumented immigrants, who are unable to vote.
Professor Emeritus in McGill’s Faculty of Law, François Crépeau, who specializes in migration and human rights law, explained the politics of migration in an interview with The Tribune. He described migration as an example of a ‘permacrisis,’ or a “long period of great difficulty, confusion, or suffering that seems to have no end,” arguing that political discourse around migration is often merely symbolic.
“Many immigration-related measures are essentially a discourse towards citizens,” Crépeau said. “If you increase deportations, it’s to tell the citizens, ‘Look, I’m protecting you better.’ At the same time, you’re spending a lot of taxpayers’ dollars, and you have to justify it. So you have to amplify the risk that those migrants are posing to society, and that’s why the discourse about the permacrisis is constantly amplified.”
One such example of this type of discourse came in 2012, when Canada altered its punitive measures for migrant smuggling. The law now mandates a maximum of 14 years’ imprisonment for bringing one migrant illegally, the same punishment as for sexual assault with a weapon. The punishment for bringing 10 or more people into Canada illegally is prison for life—the equivalent of a crime against humanity.
“The penalties that were decided by the Canadian government at that time were not designed to be implemented,” Crépeau said. “They were designed to send a message to the migrants, but most importantly, to the electorate. ‘Look how tough we are on crime.’”
Crépeau continued, explaining the myriad of mechanisms that can be invoked to avoid detention and deportation. He listed, “Bail, guarantors, house arrests, ankle bracelets, being housed with community organizations, reporting to the police every day or every week.” These alternatives have been called for by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) for nearly 30 years, but they do not exist in immigration law. Rather, governments focus on punishments that bring electoral reward. Not only is the political display of detention an attempt at demonstrating heightened security measures, but the detention centres themselves simultaneously create jobs in, for example, construction work, management, and security. This is the core of the permacrisis: Politicians neglecting immigrants in order to appease the electorate.
“Most [migrants] are totally innocuous. They have a job. They’re solidly citizens in all aspects except their papers. As long as we don’t recognize that, well, our politicians are going to continue to peddle this idea that these are dangerous people and we need to take very harsh measures like deportation and detention to get rid of them or protect the citizenry from them,” Crépeau said.
In 2025 alone, Canada deported nearly 19,000 people—a sharp increase since 2022, when around 8,000 deportations occurred. Solidarity Across Borders (SAB), a Montreal-based migrant justice network, has organized to confront Canada’s unjust immigration system since 2003. Shi Tao Zhang, a representative from SAB, spoke with The Tribune on the years-long injustices migrants have faced in Canada.
“Canadian Border Services Agency [CBSA] have yearly quotas of deportation and [...] they’ve increased their goal by 25 per cent for this fiscal year as compared to last year, which is very worrying to me personally, because I feel like they’re just treating human beings like numbers,” Zhang described. “At the end of the fiscal year to meet their quota, they’ll often ramp up deportation.”
Canada continues to deport and detain systematically in the name of political discourse and electoral reward, while thousands of migrants’ lives are violently uprooted.
THE LEGAL BLACK HOLE OF DETENTION
The basic human dignity afforded to all citizens under due process is not extended to migrants, placing them in a vulnerable space where detention sentences are irresolute and lives often unravel.
“When you’re in detention, your entire life stops. You become isolated from your family. You become isolated from everything. People lose essential pieces of their lives, people lose their jobs, people lose their housing and become homeless,” Zhang said.
Unlike jails or prisons, immigration detention is not formally punitive, but rather categorized as ‘administrative.’ Thus, it functions as a bureaucratic measure used to ensure removal, confirm identity, or address what authorities describe as a flight risk. Because it is not a criminal sentence, detainees are not serving time for an offence. Many have not been charged with any crime at all. While international human rights law outlines general protections for detained individuals, immigration detention operates in a grey zone. There is no fixed sentence, no guaranteed release date, and no trial determining guilt or innocence.
In Canada, detainees are subject to periodic detention reviews, but release is never guaranteed. If the CBSA argues that an individual is unlikely to appear for removal or poses a security concern, detention can continue for months or even years.
“You have international law about the rules for detention to respect the dignity of [prisoners]. They’re detained, but they’re not deprived of dignity. That doesn’t apply to detention centres, because this is administrative detention,” Crépeau explained. “It’s not a pre-trial detention or post-trial detention [....] They stay in detention for months or years on end, without any trial of any kind. And there’s no rule applying to that.”
As a result, the living conditions within these centres cannot be tracked. Even after release, migrants often remain undocumented, with any brutality witnessed inside the centres going unreported out of fear. Oversight mechanisms are limited, and because detention is administrative rather than criminal, it falls outside many of the reporting systems that govern prisons. Advocates argue that this opacity makes it difficult to track use of force, medical neglect, or prolonged confinement. Upon release, many migrants return to legal limbo: Unable to work, access housing, or report mistreatment without risking further scrutiny.
While much of the public scrutiny surrounding immigration detention has focused on the U.S., where footage of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and overcrowded facilities circulate widely online, many Canadian advocates caution that this brutality is not a unique issue to the U.S. According to SAB, detainees across centres in Canada have described prolonged confinement with limited access to basic hygiene supplies, inconsistent medical attention, and restricted outdoor time.
“Because what ICE is doing is overtly brutal and deliberately cruel, it’s attracting a lot of attention because it’s being filmed and disseminated online. But I think what Canadians don’t realize [...] is CBSA is perpetrating the same types of violence on migrants here, but in silence, so no one really knows. They break into people’s rooms at night, they laugh at the children whose parents were arrested and make them cry,” Zhang said.
Just north of Montreal, the Laval Immigration Holding Centre houses individuals awaiting deportation. The centre operates within a distinct oversight structure, and much of its day-to-day management is contracted to private security—a practice that tends to diffuse responsibility. Beyond the concern of what happens inside the facility, very little of its operations are visible to the broader public, and many detainees’ stories are only heard because of activist groups like SAB that communicate with detainees regularly.
“It’s this regime of administrative detention that’s separate from the usual [...] carceral system, because in administrative detention, they can technically keep you inside for as long as they want to,” Zhang said. “Unless you have a competent lawyer who intervenes, it’s usually very, very difficult, [...] it’s kind of like a black hole.”
OUTSOURCING ACCOUNTABILITY
As migration has increasingly been framed as a security concern rather than a humanitarian or administrative one, its enforcement expands beyond the CBSA, seeping into cities. Zhang described the key role the Service de Police de la Ville de Montreal (SPVM) has played in advancing detention and deportation, noting that even though Montreal became a sanctuary city in 2017—theoretically meaning that the SPVM is no longer supposed to collaborate with CBSA—both institutions still work closely together.
“In 2023, there were around 1,000 calls made from the SPVM to CBSA in terms of flagging or checking legal status,” Zhang explained. “There is something specific with the way the SPVM operates with CBSA with racial profiling [....] It is obviously more likely for someone who’s racialized to get stopped.”
Photojournalist William Wilson has reported on SPVM brutality at protests for nearly 10 years and spoke with The Tribune about how SPVM attitudes have changed towards the public in the past decade.
“Nowadays, the police are so intensely intimidating people [....] And that’s new. That’s totally new,” Wilson said. “10 years ago, they used to stay at a distance until the march got moving in the streets. But nowadays, it is just like they’re breathing down their neck the second they arrive.”
While public police remain central to interior enforcement, migration control is increasingly intertwined with private security actors operating under government contract. Specifically, there has recently been public outcry over Canada’s involvement in U.S. deportation centres, with many protesting and signing petitions against the Montreal-based security company, GardaWorld. Despite the company’s leverage within American detention systems, it is a recent recipient of over $100 million CAD in Canadian government contracts since Mark Carney stepped in as prime minister.
GardaWorld has security guards in detention centres across Canada, including at the Laval Immigration Holding Centre, as well as throughout some of the more controversial detention centres in the U.S. One such example is the South Florida Detention Facility, infamously nicknamed ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ given its location situated amidst a moat of alligators.
Because private security firms operate under contractual agreements rather than public policing mandates, oversight mechanisms differ. Complaints processes, transparency requirements, and reporting obligations are often less visible to the public.
“[Security contractors] have a key advantage. The supervision of their activities is much more difficult, as long as you have the military or the police, but you have oversight mechanisms, public oversight mechanisms that will report on what errors have been made and who did what [and] when, and you will get to the bottom of the thing,” Crépeau explained. “[With private security], it’s not done outside. It’s done inside [...] where you have no journalists, no NGOs, no oversight mechanism.”
The normalization of private security extends beyond detention infrastructure, as Montreal institutions increasingly rely on contracted security personnel to manage protests and campus unrest. GardaWorld manages security at 50 per cent of Canada’s airports and works with universities, maintaining a contractual relationship with McGill itself from Aug. 26, 2024, through April 30, 2027. As of 2024, Garda is McGill’s only private security, although they also hired Sirco in 2024 to dismantle the pro-Palestine encampment.
Around the same time, Wilson covered a pro-Palestine protest on McGill’s campus and described the tactics used by the private security that day. He showed a video someone had filmed of him at the rally—10 or so guards completely surrounded him, with their shields, face coverings, and various intimidation tactics, while Wilson stood engulfed, holding his camera and yelling, “I’m a journalist.”
“They started beating the shit out of people, and I was screaming at them, ‘I can’t move, I can’t move. I have nowhere to go,’” Wilson recounted. “That was the biggest security operation I’ve seen [McGill] do. They must have hired at least 100 people just that day.”
This expansion reflects a broader cultural shift in which private security personnel assume roles once associated primarily with public police, often with fewer transparency requirements, and as oversight mechanisms struggle to keep pace, the expansion of private security reveals the deeper transformation in how migration—and public order—are governed and surveilled.
THE HUMAN COST OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Throughout debates on migration, the language of security has become increasingly dominant and invoked to justify border closures, the expansion of policing, and administrative detention. When migrants are cast as risks to be managed, enforcement measures can expand with limited public scrutiny; policies framed as procedural or preventative often carry deeply personal consequences.
The validation of detention and deportation perpetuates the narrative that migrants are dangerous. Consequently, security frameworks surrounding the measures become normalized and embedded into public life. With the abolition of the PEQ and other measures like it, jobs are lost, families are separated, and lives are suspended in uncertainty. If the issue of migration begins as discourse, its consequences reverberate far beyond policy.
