Via The Lancet, a letter on behalf of 2,002 individuals and 34 organizational signatories: End immigration detention: an open letter. Click or tap through for supplementary materials.
To the Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Minister of Health; the Honourable Ralph Goodale, Minister of Community Safety and Emergency Preparedness; the Honourable Ahmed D Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship; and the Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
Over the past 6 years, Canada has held approximately 45 000 people in immigration detention. For the first time in over a decade, Canada is projected to see a sharp rise in the total number of detainees. Children continue to be detained in Canada in large numbers, with current projections exceeding last year's total of 162 children held in immigration detention.
We are a group of health-care providers working in Canada who—like many around the world—have been watching, with horror, the news of the separation of over 2000 child migrants from their parents in the USA. This cruelty is apparently the newest front in the Trump administration's war against asylum seekers. We've heard audio recordings of young children begging for their parents, and read first person accounts of migrants being told they will never see their children again.
As health-care providers, we regularly see the results of childhood trauma in patients of all ages. Harm done at a young age can reverberate throughout one's life, causing intense distress and health consequences. We are not surprised that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Canadian Paediatric Society, the American Medical Association, and the Canadian Medical Association have all come out with strong statements condemning the separation of migrant children from their families.
In Canada, immigration detention of both adults and children, and family separation, have been a long-standing and grave concern. Canadian research and reports have repeatedly shown the severe mental health effects of even short-term detention on both adults and children. These effects can include depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in adults, and regression of developmental milestones, sleep disruption, anxiety, and depression in children.
We urge our federal leaders to take action on this issue and consider how history will look back on what we as a country choose to do right now. Although Canada's practice of detaining migrant children is not new, the general public is now rapidly becoming more aware of it. To criticise the USA when children are being detained and separated from their families here in Canada is hypocrisy, actions that cause similar severe psychological trauma, which physicians and other mental health experts are now speaking out about.
For the past few years, health-care providers in Canada have been calling for an end to the indefinite detention of migrants, the separation of families, and the detention of children. In 2017, the Canadian Medical Association passed a resolution calling for “legislative changes to protect migrants and refugees from arbitrary and indefinite detention in jails and jail-like facilities.”
We call on the Canadian government to take action immediately (panel).
Panel
Our appeals to the Canadian Government
• End child detention and family separation in Canada. Imprisoning children, or forcibly separating them from their parents, is simply not acceptable, no matter the migratory status of the children or their parents
• End immigration detention in Canada. In Canada, migrants are detained in both immigration holding centres and maximum security jails; we join a group of Canada's leading physicians, academics, lawyers, community organisers, and policy makers in calling for the government to stop holding immigration detainees in maximum security correctional facilities and to end the practice of indefinite immigration detention; we join these experts in stating that, as a matter of principle, individuals should not be placed in immigration detention or separated from their families—if individuals pose a danger to themselves or to others, legal measures outside the scope of immigration policy should be used to address such situations
• End the Safe Third Country Agreement. We join Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care in calling for an end to the Safe Third Country Agreement; the recent actions of President Trump and Attorney General Sessions have made it clear that the USA is not a safe country for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers
• Call on the USA to end its practice of child and family detention. Following President Trump's executive order, there is fear within the medical community that while the end of child separation is a positive step forward, more children and families will end up in immigration detention
