COVID-19 IMPACTS ON IMMIGRATION DETENTION: GLOBAL RESPONSES CANADA: THE CORDON SANITAIRE AND THE SHIFTING THREATS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC Since Confederation in 1867, Canadian officials have called upon quarantine measures, and, later, immigration detention, to control, contain, manage, and eventually expel foreigners. A pattern of legislation marks potential and current immigrants with diseases or disabilities as liabilities burdening a fragile public health care system.1 During COVID-19, this pattern continues with a national fear of foreign “infections” overriding the rights of newcomers and permanent residents – as well as their children, other dependents, and even people who “looked like immigrants”. Yet, these concerns were balanced against the threats posed by the detention centres themselves, thus leading to a reduction in detention. The socio-legal understanding of the “cordon sanitaire” is helpful here. The original “sanitary cordon” or “health border” was a perimeter set up in France during the Middle Ages to control the outbreak of Black Death by preventing anyone from leaving and thus spreading the disease. Since then, and to various effects on stigmatized communities, cordons sanitaires have quarantined residents of Georgia, Texas, and Florida in the 1880s to contain yellow fever; Honolulu’s ‘Chinatown’ in 1900 to control a bubonic plague outbreak; and Poland during World War I to combat a typhus outbreak. 2 We can extend this idea to capture the border as a safeguard not to contain disease but to repel it. Popular discourse associates migrants with bringing dangerousness, invasion, panic, and uncertainty, as well as carrying bio-medical risks and, inter alia, bio-security risks. 3 We can think here of Canadian and international media depicting or describing refugees and other migrants literally as infectious diseases, rising floodwaters, animals, or potential terrorists.4 By recognizing the power of the cordon sanitaire, we can unpack the idea of the border or detention centre as a literal and metaphorical bulwark against pollution or harm. But what happens when the threat emanates not from migrants but from the conditions of their confinements? The federal Government of Canada instituted a national quarantine and called for de-carceration of prisons and detention centres. How will this impact the power of the cordon sanitaire, the future of migration control, and public and government thinking about the acceptability of incarcerating migrants in the first place? This is the legal, social, and policy experiment that Canada confronts as it grapples with COVID-19. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 IMMIGRATION DETENTION IN CANADA The Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) Section 55 vests Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers with the discretionary power to detain. The CBSA assists the Ministry of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and the Immigration Division (ID) of the Immigration and Refugee Board to make decisions on admissibility. CBSA officers can stop migrants for questioning, take breath and blood samples, and search, arrest, and detain people without warrants. During the 2018-19 fiscal year, the CBSA officially detained 8,781 foreign nationals, with an average of 342 people detained each day. 5 With an average time in detention of 13.8 days but a median length of 1 day, we can see that some people are detained for extremely long periods. Most detention is “back-end” or pre-removal, and takes place in Ontario. In 2018-19, 85 per cent of immigration detainees were held because they were deemed to be unlikely to appear for an immigration or admissibility hearing.6 IRPA S27 empowers ID adjudicators to conduct routine hearings to review the grounds for every detention until the case is concluded through release or removal from Canada. IRPA S38 prohibits entrance to immigrants posing dangers or significant financial costs to public health. CBSA detains in its own detention facilities known as immigration holding centres (IHCs) as well as in police cells and provincial prisons. The IHCs are located near international airports in Toronto, Montreal, and a new facility is being constructed near Vancouver. Categorized as medium-security facilities, IHCs tend to have poor ventilation, lack hygiene products, and provide limited access to medical care.7 Since detainees share rooms and eat meals together, it is difficult to socially distance in the IHCs. Likewise, despite international rules prohibiting “co-mingling”, detainees incarcerated in provincial prisons often share the common area, cells, and units with inmates. In 2016, the Liberal Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged $138 million to “transform” the detention estate over five years through the so-called National Immigration Detention Framework (NIDF). The NIDF has expanded “alternatives to detention” programs, including the problematic deployment of electronic ankle shackles and biometric voice-recognition check-in systems. 8 Coyte, P. & Thavorn, K. 2010. When does an immigrant with HIV represent an excessive demand on Canadian health or social services? Aporia 2(3), 6-17; Mosoff, Judith. 1998. “Excessive Demand on the Canadian Conscience: Disability, Family, and Immigration.” Manitoba Law Journal 26 (02):149 – 180; Niles, Chavon A. 2018. “Who gets in? The Price of Acceptance in Canada.” Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis 7 (01):148 – 162; Wilton, Robert, Stine Hansen, and Edward Hall. 2017. “Disabled People, Medical Inadmissibility, and the Differential Politics of Immigration.” The Canadian Geographer 61 (03):389 - 400. Kaplan Hoffman, Rachel, and Keith Hoffman. 2015. “Ethical Considerations in the Use of Cordons Sanitaires.” Clinical Correlations. Available online at https://www. clinicalcorrelations.org/2015/02/19/ethical-considerations-in-the-use-of-cordons-sanitaires/ Gill, Nick. 2011. “Whose “No Borders”? Achieving Border Liberalization for the Right Reasons.” Refuge 26 (2):107 – 120; Lawlor, Andrea, and Erin Tolley. 2017. “Deciding Who’s Legitimate: News Media Framing of Immigrants and Refugees.” International Journal of Communication 11:967 - 991. Cisneros, J. David. 2008. “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigration.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 (04):569 – 601; Esses, Victoria M., Stelian Medianu, and Andrea S. Lawson. 2013. “Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees.” Journal of Social Issues 69 (3):518-536; Mountz, Alison. 2004. “Embodying the nation-state: Canada’s response to human smuggling.” Political Geography 23 (3):323 - 345. Canada Border Services Agency. 2020. “Annual Detention Statistics - 2012-2019” Government of Canada, online:https://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/security-securite/ detent/stat-2012-2019-eng.html Durrani, Tebasum. 2020. “Why immigration holding centres could become COVID-19 hot spots.” Last Modified 30 March, accessed 05 April. https://www.tvo.org/ article/why-immigration-holding-centres-could-become-covid-19-hot-spots. Gros, Hanna, and Samer Muscati. 2020. “Canada’s immigration detainees at higher risk in pandemic.” Last Modified 23 March, accessed 03 April. https:// ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/gros-and-muscati-canadas-immigration-detainees-at-risk-in-pandemic/.s Silverman, Stephanie J. 2018. “Electronically monitoring migrants treats them like criminals.” Last Modified 25 January, accessed 05 May. https://theconversation. com/electronically-monitoring-migrants-treats-them-like-criminals-90521. International Detention Coalition and Western Sydney University