Tuesday 13 January 2015

Transportation not Deportation Campaign Update

Sanctuary Health is a signatory to Transportation not Deportation, a recently-launched community campaign calling for an immediate end to Translink and Transit police collaboration with Canada Border Services Agency.

If you are interested in giving your input on the campaign, we are hosting a community meeting on January 28th from 6:00 PM to 8 PM at the YWCA on 733 Beatty Street. At the meeting, we hope to share experiences and develop ideas, strategies and solutions on how we can collectively reach our goals. For more information about the event, you can see the Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/419426174876342/.

Currently, as part of this campaign we have two requests:

1) That your organization endorse our five demands.
http://transportationnotdeportation.wordpress.com/demands/

2) That you individually please sign this petition and circulate it to your networks. We are aiming to reach thousands of signatures to present directly to officials:
https://www.change.org/p/translink-and-transit-police-stop-turning-public-transit-into-a-border-checkpoint

Transportation not Deportation is a community campaign calling for an immediate end to Translink and Transit Police collaboration with Canada Border Services Agency. This campaign was launched this past year when it was revealed that Mexican migrant Lucia Vega Jiménez, who committed suicide in a detention centre, was handed over to CBSA by Transit police. Turns out, Transit Police reported 328 people to Canada Border Services Agency in 2013, one in five of whom faced a subsequent immigration investigation including deportation.
You can read more here on Transit Police and CBSA collaboration:
http://transportationnotdeportation.wordpress.com/key-facts/

Over the past few months, we have been busy researching the collaboration between CBSA and Transit Police, have hosted community meetings and actions, and been in direct communication with TransLink to pressure them to stop collaborating with CBSA. We are hopeful that with community pressure we can win some tangible victories, as even police agencies in the U.S. are refusing to enforce federal immigration laws.

We hope you will join us in pushing this critical issue forward.