This morning at 10:30am, seven members from the Montreal-area migrant justice coalition, Solidarity Across Borders (SAB), paid a visit to the Immigration Canada offices downtown.

Solidarity Across Borders Demands Justice for Wendy Maxwell
Montreal - March 14, 2005

This morning at 10:30am, seven members from the Montreal-area migrant justice coalition, Solidarity Across Borders (SAB), paid a visit to the Immigration Canada offices downtown.

The aim of the visit was to hand-deliver a letter to a representative of the immigration minister, Joe Volpe, on behalf of Wendy Maxwell.

Wendy is a Costa Rican refugee of Jamaican descent. She had been in Canada for seven years before she was arrested recently by Toronto police officers at an International Women's Day event at Ryerson university. She is due to be deported on Monday morning, and could be on a plane bound for Costa Rica by the time this report is read.

The letter which the SAB members delivered stressed the urgency of the matter, knowing that Wendy was to be deported.

The group entered the immigration offices and proceeded to the second floor of the building. There, they approached a security guard and demanded to speak with a representative of the Immigration Minister. The security guard refused, and instead pointed to a kiosk with some phones on tables. He instructed the group to pick up the phones and speak to whoever picked up the line.

A few from the group attempted this, only to be frustrated by Immigration Canada's hotline system which only patched them through to an unsympathetic phone operator in Ottawa. Those on the phone again stressed that Wendy was to be deported within a matter of hours and that they needed to speak with someone “in charge