Congress of Progressive Filipinos Canadians (CPFC)
National Statement
June 22, 2018
Toronto, ON – We, the Congress of Progressive Filipino Canadians, strongly condemn the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that has grossly violated the fundamental human rights of thousands of migrant and refugee families. This racist, inhumane and violent policy has been aimed at banning people of the “third-world”, Muslims, migrants and refugee asylum seekers safe entry into the United States, unleashing its latest attacks on their children. Over the past two months, the Trump government forcibly separated more than 2,300 children from their families and has detained them in child-internment camps in Texas. The unconscionable and cruel treatment of these families and their children, torn apart from each other as they are herded into cages, identified by mere number tags on their chests, forced to sleep on floors, and stripped of their dignity, is comparable to the beginnings of the world’s worst atrocities as seen in history, particularly in the Japanese Internment camps and the Holocaust.
Though President Trump has signed an executive order on June 20, 2018 reversing the separation of children from their parents after international condemnation and widespread public outcry, this new development will not rid of the irreversible damage inflicted on the children and their families as they continue to be jailed, humiliated, abused and kept in fear under Trump’s “crackdown” on immigration. As progressive Filipino Canadians critical of our own experiences as a heavily state-regulated and racialized immigrant community, we appeal to all freedom and justice-loving people to continue to stand and fight against this horrific barbarism and hold the Trump administration accountable for these intolerable crimes against humanity.
Today, we are facing the lingering legacy of fascism through U.S.-led imperialist wars, destruction, plunder and domination, which has caused the unprecedented mass displacement of entire peoples and fuel the ongoing refugee crises around the globe. Having already suffered the realities of war, extreme poverty and making the dire and dangerous journey for escape, migrants and refugees are faced with Trump’s sadistic prohibitive measures and are treated like dangerous criminals and rabid animals upon reaching U.S. borders.
The Canadian state, with its’ unresolved and horrid history of forcibly taking native and indigenous children away from their parents and placing them into residential schools, continues in systematically criminalizing, detaining, and separating migrants and refugees from their children in its own immigration detention centres. This has undoubtedly and intensely traumatized these families, especially the children, most of whom if not all will have to live through the long-term physical, psychological and emotional impacts of such an ordeal for the rest of their lives.
Immigration and refugee lawyer Hanna Gros with the International Human Rights Program, uncovered that an average of 182 minors a year have been detained by the Canada Border Services Agency since 2015. The Canadian government also fully enforces the “Safe Third Country” agreement between Canada and the United States. Under the agreement, a person(s) seeking refugee status must make the claim in the country in which they first arrive in after leaving their country of origin. In practice, the agreement is used to deny refugee asylum seekers entry into Canada if they have first arrived in the U.S. This law in effect is a dangerous legal mechanism used to deport refugees back to the U.S., which it ironically recognizes as the first “safe” country.
We must continue to stay vigilant and resist the blatant normalization of fascism. Let us not rest easy and think, even for a moment, that Trump’s executive order comes from a place of conscience. His administration continues to treat the human rights and dignity of people of colour, indigenous peoples, migrants, immigrants, refugees and poor communities as irrelevant and non-existent, evident in the detention, separation and abuse of those families and their children. Trump and his allies, including Canada, have shown time and time again to be devoid of conscience, empathy, compassion and sense of genuine justice. They will not think twice in launching wars of aggression throughout the world, and in annihilating indigenous peoples, refugees, migrants, immigrants and other marginalized communities in order to serve and protect their imperialist and colonial interests.
As progressives and freedom-loving people, we stand united and continue to actively struggle against the white-supremacist tactic of blaming and attacking immigrants, migrants and refugees for all the antagonisms in our societies. As part of the fight for a just and lasting peace for our communities and the future generations, we will strengthen our resolve in our fight against imperialism and all its forms.
Expose and oppose imperialist globalization!
Stop the separation of migrant and refugee families!
Stop immigration detention and deportations!