VANCOUVER - Several B.C. groups are calling on Transit Police to stop sharing all information about migrants with the Canada Border Services Agency.
Transit Police announced last week that it would no longer arrest migrants for the CBSA unless they were wanted on an outstanding warrant.
Omar Chu, of the group Transportation Not Deportation, told reporters on Friday that the decision was “a step in the right direction.”
“We just want to ensure that information sharing does not occur between Transit Police and CBSA, and that there is oversight of these directives,” Chu said. “We want to see a drastic reduction in contacts to CBSA.”
The Transit Police decision followed the December 2013 death of Lucia Vega Jimenez, a Mexican woman who hanged herself in a CBSA holding facility after Transit Police stopped her for fare evasion.
Joining Transportation Not Deportation at Friday’s meeting of the Transit Police board were representatives from a variety of groups, including the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the Council of Canadians Acting for Social Justice, Mexicans Living in Vancouver, and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.
The attendees addressed the board about a variety of issues, from the necessity of transit officers carrying firearms to the need for oversight of the communications that do occur between Transit Police and the CBSA.
On that latter issue, Transit Police Const. Anne Drennan explained the procedure that the agency would be following:
“The contacts that are made between our agency and CBSA, if there are any, must go through a watch commander, who is the supervisor for the entire shift,” Drennan said. “He or she would make the decision as to whether or not it would be appropriate for CBSA to be contacted at all. Those contacts will be monitored and tabulated, and at some point we will know how many contacts are actually being made. We anticipate that there won’t be many.”
The assembled groups called on Transit Police to commit to not calling CBSA tip lines and accepting a broader range of identification including birth certificates or photo ID from any country, something Drennan said would be “a priority” for the organization.
With files from The Canadian Press
