A Mexican Family

Tracked Down by

Immigration Canada

. . . . . by Laura-Julie Perreault (c) La Presse

. . . . _page one news_ -- Thursday, June 23, 2005 --

"What's going on? Clara, did we do something wrong?" Little Léon Arellano, aged 7, was taken aback when Montreal policemen entered the family's apartment in Rosemont. They were there to arrest him and his four brothers and sisters. The parents were out.

"What's going on? Clara, did we do something wrong?" Little Léon Arellano, aged 7, was taken aback when Montreal policemen entered the family's apartment in Rosemont. They were there to arrest him and his four brothers and sisters. The parents were out.

Before Clara Arellano, 18, had time to answer her younger brother, a police officer answered the boy: "You are under arrest. Your deportation order states you were supposed to leave Canada by March 12th." The children, born in Mexico, had been rejected as legitimate exiles. "Where are your parents?" asked the police.

Clara said she did not know where her mother, Lila Diaz, and her father, Jose Oscar Arellano had gone. But that did not stop police from proceding to this arrest. The young woman, who turned 14 just before her family left Mexico to seek refuge in Canada, says that the officers were about to place handcuffs on her when the youngest child, Génésis, barely 3 years old, started crying.

"There were 15 policemen. We left the apartment without grabbing a thing. It was like we were thieves. The kids couldn't stop crying," recounted Clara to La Presse yesterday, during our interview in the visiting room of Immigration's Centre de prevention in Laval. Since Tuesday evening, Clara, with her brothers and sisters Brandon, 11, Léon, 7, Samanta, 6, and Génésis, 3, have been locked up there.

Behind Barbed Wire

Immigrants in detention are held at this centre located on Montée Saint-François in Laval, right next to a correctional facility (prison). Barbed wire surrounds the building. A few hours daily the detainees can have visitors. Clara Arellano and the four children share a cell with three beds.

"We are under surveillance, even when we go to the toilette, exclamed 11-year-old Brandon. I don't understand. We are not robbers, we are a normal family," he proclaimed yesterday. "But we do not want to live in Mexico. The state police want to harm us."

To avoid expulsion, the family, who had exhausted all available legal procedures by last March, moved out of their Longueuil lodgings to go underground. They found a place they thought was safe in Rosemont. The police traced them to the Rosemont hideout this week.

The children's parents along with an elder brother (he was at work when the arrests occurred) are still hiding out. Yesterday the mother of the five detainees, along with her husband, met with La Presse in a café. "We came to Canada in 2001 because we believed it was a humanitarian country. I saw the opposite with my own eyes. What they are doing to the children, that is cruelty!" declaimed Lila Diaz, 43, on the verge of tears. A 19-year-old son of hers has already been deported. She worries that the same fate now awaits the younger members of her eight children.

The Arellano-Diaz family are not alone in condemning detention by the federal agency responsible for deportations -- the Canada Border Services Agency. "If they arrested the children in order to force the parents out of hiding, it is unjustified. In accord with the principle of ' the greater interest of a child,' all interventions that separate a child from a parent must be taken in the interest of that child. It is difficult to see how, in this case, the Agency was applying the principle," explained the president of the League of Rights, Pierre-Louis Fortin-Legris.

The spokesman for the Canada Border Services Agency, Robert Gervais, acknowledged yesterday that the detention of minors is rare. "Under the law, detaining children is permitted, but it is a last resort," he noted.

The Arellano-Diaz parents came within a hair's breadth of turning themselves in to the police within hours of the children being arrested, but immigrant and refugee rights groups successfully talked them out of it.

Now their hope is placed on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRBC), which will hear the children's case tomorrow at 1:00 PM. During the hearing, the judge will review the detention order.

According to the Immigration Board lawyer Joseph Allen, the worst-case scenario is that the judge will order that Clara, Brandon, Samanta and Léon be deported. "One of them has reached her majority and she can take care of the others," the lawyer explained yesterday. "Little Génésis, who was born in Canada, is thus a Canadian citizen and may stay in the country. Someone qualified to look after her can ask for custody. Her 27-year-old brother, who does not face expulsion because he is sponsored by his Canadian wife, could take her in."

The group "No One is Illegal" hopes that the judge will release the children and give the family a suspension in the procedures. The Arellano-Diaz couple wants another hearing. They protest that they were misinformed by their first lawyer and are ready to present documents to the authorities to prove that in Mexico they were victims of violent and corrupt police. It was in December, 2002, that the original commissioner who heard their case rejected their application for asylum. "That was the start of our nightmare," sighs Lila Diaz.