‎As US Tightens Immigration Enforcement, More Asylum Seekers Turn to Canada But Ottawa Is Also Closing Doors

The Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdown has pushed a growing number of migrants toward Canada throughout 2025 and into 2026, even as Ottawa has simultaneously tightened its own asylum rules, creating a complicated picture in which rising demand meets shrinking access.

A Steady Rise in Claims
More than 34,000 asylum applications were made in Canada in 2025, with Haiti, the United States, and Venezuela among the top countries of citizenship represented among claimants, according to the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) .

Immigration lawyers say the surge has been driven directly by fear inside the United States: footage of confrontations between residents and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in cities like Minneapolis has fuelled a rise in inquiries from people looking to leave the US altogether.

Data compiled through 2025 showed the trend accelerating sharply at points. In one stretch, the number of refugee seekers processed by CBSA rose 87 percent between January and April 2025, while asylum claims processed by Canadian border agents jumped from 2,940 to 4,560 in a single month following the Trump administration's late-March move to pause protected legal status for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans under the CHNV parole programme.

At the Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle crossing south of Montreal the busiest land port between New York and Quebec asylum claims rose more than 400 percent year-on-year during the first week of July, with monthly totals climbing 128 percent in June alone . By late July, more than 3,000 asylum seekers had been processed at the Lacolle crossing, nearly triple the number recorded the previous month, with most identified as being of Haitian origin fleeing the US crackdown.

Ottawa Tightens the Door Even as
Demand Rises
Even as arrivals climbed, Canada moved in the opposite direction on policy. The Strengthening Canada's Immigration System and Borders Act known as Bill C-2, later reintroduced as Bill C-12 received Royal Assent on March 26, 2026, introducing two major new eligibility barriers to Canada's refugee determination system.

The law bars asylum seekers who have been in Canada for more than a year from accessing a full hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), applied retroactively to claimants who entered after June 24, 2020, and also blocks people who claim asylum more than 14 days after crossing into Canada irregularly from the US land border.

Within days of the law taking effect, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) began issuing "procedural fairness" letters warning asylum seekers that their claims might no longer qualify for a full IRB hearing. An estimated 30,000 people were affected as of January 31, 2026, according to an IRCC spokesperson, though the department stressed the letters are not deportation notices, since affected individuals retain access to a pre-removal risk assessment.

Immigration lawyers described the rollout as having caused "mass panic" among claimants, particularly nationals of Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Gaza countries where Canada maintains removal moratoriums even though the new letters instructed some of them to leave immediately.

Notably, records obtained by CBC News revealed that these restrictive measures were first requested by the previous Trudeau government's immigration minister, Marc Miller, in a 2024 letter but were not acted on until passed under Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Carney has taken a markedly different public stance from his predecessor on the issue, telling reporters it is "not acceptable" for people to leave the US specifically to claim asylum in Canada, and affirming that under the Safe Third Country Agreement, Canada can and will send many claimants back.

The Safe Third Country Agreement Remains the Key Barrier

The Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which bars most people from claiming asylum in Canada if they first arrived in the US, has now been expanded to cover the entire Canada-US land border closing informal crossing points like Roxham Road and Emerson, Manitoba, that were previously used to bypass the agreement by crossing between official ports of entry.

Immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk said this change means it no longer matters whether a crossing is regular or irregular: claimants arriving from the US are, in most cases, simply turned back. In April 2025 alone, 494 ineligible refugee claimants were turned back at the border under the STCA, up 76 percent from January of that year.

A More Cautious Ottawa on Refugee Numbers Broadly

The tightening extends beyond asylum claims at the border. Canada's 2026–2028 Immigration Levels Plan reduces the overall refugee and humanitarian intake, with privately sponsored refugee admissions cut from 23,000 in 2025 to 16,000 in 2026 a 30 percent reduction and Government-Assisted Refugee admissions reduced from 15,250 to 13,250 .

The Canadian Council for Refugees has criticized the humanitarian allocation as "far from" the 15 percent of total immigration levels it says should be dedicated to refugee resettlement, warning that more than 90,000 refugees are currently waiting for a permanent home in Canada through private sponsorship, with wait times approaching six years.

What This Means Going Forward
Immigration observers caution against expecting a repeat of the historic surges seen during Trump's first term, when informal crossings at Roxham Road peaked at roughly 165 people a day. With the STCA now covering the entire border and Bill C-12's new eligibility bars in force, asylum seekers leaving the US for Canada today are, in the words of one immigration lawyer, "likely to be turned away".

The result is a paradox: even as fear of US enforcement pushes more people north, Canada's asylum system has simultaneously become harder to access than at almost any point in the past decade.

Mustapha Bature Sallama
Medical/Science communicator, Private Investigator, Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Analysis,United States Institute of Peace (USIP), [email protected] +233555275880

References
Global News, "U.S. immigration crackdown fuels interest in Canada as asylum numbers rise" https://globalnews.ca/news/11623706/us-immigration-crackdown-fuels-interest-in-canada/

Investigative Post, "US crackdown on migrants sends refugees to Canada, data shows" https://investigativepost.org/2025/08/05/u-s-crackdown-sends-refugees-to-canada/

CBC News, "Rise in asylum seekers crossing into Quebec as U.S. revokes status of thousands of migrants" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/rise-asylum-seekers-quebec-1.7505027

Global News, "Quebec's Lacolle border sees surge in asylum seekers" https://globalnews.ca/news/11314856/asylum-seekers-quebec-lacolle-border-crossing-soar/

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Immigration News Canada, "Canada's New Asylum Crackdown Now Puts Thousands At Risk Of Removal" https://immigrationnewscanada.ca/new-canada-asylum-crackdown-removals-2026/

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CBC News, "Asylum crackdown passed under Carney first requested by Trudeau's immigration minister" https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-minister-asylum-crackdown-trudeau-carney-9.7163661

Buffalo Toronto Public Media, "Asylum seekers leaving US for Canada likely to be turned away" https://www.btpm.org/ontario-news/2026-07-17/asylum-seekers-leaving-us-for-canada-likely-to-be-turned-away

Canadian Council for Refugees, "Release: 2026 Immigration Levels" https://ccrweb.ca/en/release-2026-immigration-levels