Brandon Sun: Deadly border
The tragedy at the Canada/ USA border recently has everyone at CIL in shock. We have many clients from India and we have close connections with the Indian community in Manitoba. My colleague, Jaspreet, has helped hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of people come or stay in Canada. On Friday, Alastair Clarke gave an interview with Erik Pindera from the Brandon Sun. I will say that Erik has been working hard on this deeply tragic story.
Baffled immigration experts are at a loss to explain why a group of 11 people made a disastrous attempt to cross into the United States on foot in brutal weather overnight Wednesday, an ultimately tragic decision that killed a family of four.
RCMP officers found the frozen bodies of a man, woman, teenage boy and an infant just steps from the border, about 10 kilometres east of Emerson on Wednesday afternoon.
[…]
And immigration lawyer Alastair Clarke was shocked to learn the group was travelling from Canada into the U.S., something he has never encountered during his career.
“This case is extremely unusual,” Clarke said. “The facts of this case are quite different from the normal types of circumstances that we’ve seen, and I hope that they do a proper investigation to see if this isn’t just one case among many.
“If there is something systemic or if there is a larger organized group behind this, I would really worry.”
Although the identities of the family members and other members of the group have not been reported, there have been suggestions all 11 were from Gujarat, a western state in India.
There are few people from that region in Manitoba.
“I spoke with a colleague in my firm — her family is from Punjab… and we don’t have a large Gujarat population in Manitoba, it’s a pretty small community,” Clarke said.
“What she told me was that if they had sought members of the Indian community in Manitoba, anyone would’ve told them… not to (attempt a border-crossing). And so it seems like there was something else going on here, which is quite curious.”
We will be watching this story as it develops. We applaud Brandon Sun’s reporting. It is still not clear why this family was attempting to travel from Canada to the USA.
