CBSA immigration arrests during spot checks stir controversy

Thearrests of 21 undocumented workers during a vehicle safety blitz Thursday is causing controversy for the CanadaBorder Services Agency and Ontario Provincial Police.

On Aug. 14 the OPP, along with officials from the ministries of transportation and environment, and theCBSA, took part in a vehicle spot checks in northwest Toronto, around Wilson Avenue between Jane Street and Highway 400.

CBSAtold CBC News on Friday it arrested 21 people who were "in violation of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act."

But, because the arrests were made during vehicle safety check, some question the methods and motivations of theCBSAand OPP.

Immigration lawyerGuidyMamannsaid this is not routine and is, in fact, a huge breach of public trust.

In the guise of looking for safety issuesthey are abusing that power and using it for whatever they feel like,"Mamannsaid.

Safety blitzes are to determine whether or not the vehicles are safe and roadworthy, not to determine what your immigration status is. They are not connected."

'Racial profiling'

SyedHussan, who is with the migrant activist group No One IsIllegal, said the pairing of theCBSAwith the OPP amounts to targeted racial profiling.

Its a sweep, its racial profilingstopping cars in Jane and Finch under the guise of a traffic stop then coercing everyone to hand over their IDs, then detaining them,Hussansaid.

Geraldine Ortiz said her 27-year-old brother-in-law from Mexico was among those stopped on Thursday. He has been workingfor a contractor as a painter,is married to a Canadian woman and is currently in the process of making a citizenship claim, she said.

They didnt ID themselves as police orCBSA, they just told them to pull over and produce ID, Ortiz told CBC News.

He was handcuffed and detained, she said. He has since been released.

Mamannsays, even though officials found immigration violations, there is a bigger question about how the arrests were made.

Even though they appeared to have arrested some people who have some immigration issues, the questions that Canadians have to ask themselves is how much rope are we going to give the government, how much privacy do we want and do we need, he said.

Can I walk down the street and just be randomly picked off to be screened by these various government agencies even though [they] have no reasonable or probable cause that youve done anything wrong?

TheCBSAsaid there are many undocumented workers across theGTAand the arrestsThursday show the complexity of the issue.