Jun 09, 2020 —

Emile Louisdor Joseph pulled up a photograph on his phone of his twin daughters, grinning in graduation caps and gowns. 

“That’s when they graduated from high school,” he said, in Florida, in 2018. Joseph had missed the ceremony. Almost 40 years in the United States, he had traveled to Canada the year before.

Beginning after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, hundreds of people from around the world began arriving in Plattsburgh, NY by bus, by train and by air. They continued by taxi to a tiny Clinton County road that dead-ends at the Canadian border, where they had heard they could request asylum in Canada.

Originally from Haiti, Louisdor has nine adult children all born in the United States. But, by the time he decided to leave the country, his application for an American green card had stalled. He lost the job he’d had for more than a decade when his employer realized his work authorization had expired. 

“I say ‘well, I can’t do nothing,’” he recalled thinking. “I had a lot of friends who leave the country. I say, ‘Well, let me take my chance and I'll leave too.’”

Concerned about the possibility of violence or kidnapping if he returned to Haiti, Joseph turned north. He flew from West Palm Beach, FL to Plattsburgh before traveling on to to Roxham Road where, like more than 40,000 people have done since early 2017, he turned himself in to Canadian police. 

Government statistics provided to a University of Toronto researcher show that more than a third of those who arrived via Roxham Road that first year originally came from Haiti.  

“I think 2017 is probably the highest [number] we've ever had,” said Frantz André, who runs an organization that works with new Haitian immigrants to Quebec. 

André said many feared the Trump administration would end a program that allowed some Haitians to stay in the United States. Word about the route to Canada spread on social media, he said, as well as a tweet by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reading, “to those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you.”

Canada’s federal and local governments housed thousands of asylum-seekers in emergency shelters and even in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, where Joseph stayed when he first arrived.

André says it took time to for people to receive responses to their applications to remain in Canada. 

“There was already a backlog of thousands of asylum seekers files which were not actually process[ed],” he said. 

Montreal immigration attorney, Mitch Goldberg says the federal government eventually allocated more resources and started processing cases more quickly, including by expediting cases from countries in evident crises, like Syria and Yemen.

“The processing times have come […] now under control,” Goldberg said earlier this year. 

He has received calls from immigrants or their attorneys in the United States who are thinking about coming to Canada to apply for asylum. 

He cautions them that while some asylum-seekers are accepted, others – even if they have compelling humanitarian grounds to stay – do not necessarily meet the narrow grounds for protection. 

“Perhaps they their house was destroyed in a hurricane or an earthquake, for example,” he said, but, if they have not been targeted directly, “they don't fear detention. They don't fear being beaten up or being killed or tortured in your country […] your chances are very small of being recognized as a refugee.”

For the 8,500 Haitians who walked across the border, the board’s decisions on requests for asylum have been mixed. Government figures show an acceptance rate of just over 25 percent for the 5,300 who have received responses so far. However, last February, the Canadian government put a temporary stay on deportations to Haiti because of political protests and violence in the country. This has allowed many Haitians to stay in Canada for now.

With Andre’s help preparing his case, Emile Louisdor Joseph was accepted for asylum and had applied to obtain his permanent residency.  

“I'm not happy 100 percent because I'm alone,” he said, by myself.” 

But in a video his twins sent him this winter from Florida, one of them holds up her new American passport, which she had gotten to travel to visit him. 

“I think this month, next month, they'll save enough, and they told me they’re going to give me a surprise and they will be here to see me,” he said it late February. Then, “I['ll] be happy.”

By mid-March, the border had been closed to non-essential travel to slow the spread of Covid19. This week, the Canadian government opened the door to the immediate family-members of citizens and permanent residents. 

In the years since Joseph arrived, others he’s met in similar circumstances have found it so hard to be away from family, especially through the tough winters, that they had tried to cross back into the United States. Prior to the onset of Covid-19, American attorneys reported cases of returnees who have been apprehended by American border agents and faced deportation from the United States to their countries of origin.