An Edmonton pastor is fighting to save 10 members of his church from being deported to Namibia, their home country in southwest Africa.
Their claims for asylum rejected years ago, they are now being ordered to leave the country by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), which has said it wants to ramp up deportations of failed refugee claimants and some other foreign nationals this year.
The removals have been a devastating blow to the community of as few as 1,000 Namibians living in Canada, many in Edmonton. For those who have put down roots in Canada, even if they don’t have permanent status, they live in fear of the day they must report at the airport.
“If they are deported, we have lost a quarter of our membership,” Pastor Chengetaimufaro Lovemore Bere said in an interview.
There’s always this notion that Canada is open for immigrants.– Pastor Chengetaimufaro Lovemore Bere
Three other members of Bere’s church, also originally from Namibia, have already been deported from Canada.
As of June 12th, the CBSA has arrested 22 Namibian citizens in Canada, and seven have been deported this year.
“There’s always this notion that Canada is open for immigrants,” Bere said.
“But my argument is, why should we bring more people in the country if we have people already in the country who are not being afforded the same opportunity?”
Bere, who came to Canada from Zimbabwe in 2015, started Empowerment Centre Church, based at Vanguard College in the north-central Westwood community, shortly after his arrival.
Many people from Edmonton’s Namibian community were the first to join his ministry and they have been the backbone of the church ever since, he said.
They sing in the choir, serve as ushers and give money to the church.
Last month, four church members were arrested by the CBSA within a span of three weeks.
The arrests came after a series of CBSA investigations in Fort McMurray and Grande Prairie, starting in February.
In an October 2018 email obtained by CBC News, the border services agency confirmed its plan to ramp up efforts to deport failed refugee claimants and other unwelcome foreign nationals. It set a goal of increasing deportation numbers by up to 35 per cent, to 10,000 people per year.
“Based on that, we’re seeing a much higher number of individuals facing detention reviews,” said immigration lawyer Mario Bellissimo, founder of Bellissimo Law Group in Toronto. “It’s definitely led to a spike of removals.”
Deportation numbers fluctuate, but they have been declining over the last five years, from almost 19,000 in 2012 to about 7,000 in 2018.
Meanwhile, members of Canada’s small Namibian community are on high alert.
Many claimed asylum here on the basis they faced family abuse in Namibia, with few options of escape. In a video campaign, the Empowerment Centre Church is documenting some of their stories, including teenage pregnancies at the hands of abusers and forced marriages to family members.
But the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada has often ruled the asylum seekers failed to provide evidence for their cases or they have the expectation of protections in Namibia.
Acceptance rates of Namibian refugee applications have averaged around 45 per cent in recent years, lower than the average acceptance rate for all source countries, which has ranged from 54 per cent to 63 per cent since 2013, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada data.
Living in fear
Ngurimuje Mujoro was arrested by the CBSA in February at her Fort McMurray home, where she lives with her two Canadian-born children, ages six and two, and her husband, who has permanent resident status.
Mujoro arrived in Canada in 2011. Her refugee claim and appeals were denied two years later. She has lived in fear of deportation ever since.
“They took me outside of the house,” Mujoro said of her arrest. “They didn’t arrest me in front of the kids but the kids, they saw everything.”
The 28-year-old was bailed out of a holding centre within 24 hours after her husband and her friends in the Namibian community put up a $3,000 bond.
Despite a spousal sponsorship application submitted in April — it’s still being considered — Mujoro was ordered to be at the Edmonton airport on the evening of May 3, where she would be expected to board a flight to Toronto, then to Addis Ababa and finally to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city.
And she would have to make a decision about her children: take them to Namibia, a country they have never known, or leave them with their father.
Immigration violations
There are 89 Namibian citizens in the CBSA’s national deportation inventory of about 15,300 cases — that is, people who can be deported right away.
One Namibian on the list has a criminal record, said CBSA spokesperson Nicholas Dorion. The rest are failed refugee claimants who have other immigration violations, such as overstaying visas that allowed them to travel, work or study.
“Once individuals have exhausted all legal avenues of appeal/due process, they are expected to respect our laws and leave Canada or be removed,” Dorion said in an emailed statement.
“The CBSA places highest priority on removal cases involving national security, organized crime, crimes against humanity and criminals,” he said.
“Removals of failed refugees and individuals with other immigration violations are also necessary to maintain the integrity of Canada’s immigration program.”
In 2011, Namibia, a country with a population of just over 2.4 million, had suddenly jumped into the top-10 source countries for refugee protection claims made in Canada. Many of the Namibians in Edmonton came during that wave of arrivals.
More than 1,000 claims from Namibia were pending on Sept. 30, 2011, Melissa Anderson, a spokesperson for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, said in an email.
Since then, 465 Namibian migrants have obtained landed immigrant or permanent resident status in Canada, while 453 have been deported over the past 10 years.
Canada imposed visa requirements on people from Namibia in 2012 after what Jason Kenney, then immigration minister, called “an unacceptably high number of immigration violations.”
Life in Canada
Apart from the threat of deportation, members of the tight-knit Herero-speaking community, an ethnic minority that was decimated in Namibia by a genocide in the early 1900s, say they are thriving in Canada.
Every summer in Alberta they don traditional Herero dresses and military uniforms to hold solemn ceremonies and celebrations of the 1904 fight for survival against German troops, which annihilated more than 80 per cent of the Herero people in Namibia.
But as the deportations continue, the crowd at the annual Herero Day events in August is shrinking.
“There were a lot of Namibians but today they were already deported,” said Mujoro, who is Herero. “For us, taking a lot of people back home will cut our tradition.”
For Fabiola Seonduru, who like many of the cattle-rearing, nomadic Herero, grew up in a village, living in Canada has been like a dream.
“Back home I never got the opportunity to work and all that,” said Seonduru, a choir member at Bere’s Edmonton church. “I was just a village girl. So when I came here I was able to find myself working and just being established.”
Seonduru, 30, was contacted by the CBSA in May. Officials have requested the passports for her two Canadian-born children and have applied for emergency travel documents for her and her husband, both citizens of Namibia. These are all signs that deportation is imminent.
Despite Bere’s many letters of support for permanent residence applications under humanitarian and compassionate considerations, the CBSA has continued to issue their removal orders.
Some church members have simply not shown up at the airport for their deportations.
“Looking at it from a pastoral perspective and from a humanitarian perspective, I really felt that they were justified to stay in the country,” Bere said.
Failure to report for a deportation flight can result in a warrant for arrest, the CBSA states on its removal orders.
Bere is now spearheading plans for a protest march to ask Ottawa to hold off on deportations until all applications — humanitarian as well as spousal sponsorships — are processed.
Bere said the plight of his Namibian church members goes against Canada’s immigration programs which aim to reunite families.
“Their children are Canadians and taking them out of the country, it’s kind of like we’re already breaking the families,” said Bere. “Taking them outside the country, I don’t feel like it’s fair for them because it’s emotionally draining.”
Mujoro decided to bring her two children back to Namibia with her, as they await the outcome of her spousal sponsorship application there.
The family arrived at Edmonton International Airport on their departure date last month, with six-year-old son Marvelous wearing a baseball hat and a red Canada flag jacket.
Baby daughter Juliette was carried in the arms of a family friend. But they arrived too late to board the flight, which was to be rescheduled by the CBSA.
Mujoro has dreams of returning to Canada as a permanent resident, getting her high school diploma, then opening a Namibian restaurant here.
“Sometimes we feel so bad inside. We feel like, rejected,” said Mujoro. “But for me, it’s not the end and I do believe that I’m going to come back.”
