A Guinean living in Quebec facing deportation is turning to the courts to “address the unusual delays in immigration processing in the family reunification category.” Kaba Keita is criticizing the Quebec government for creating “unreasonable” wait times for immigrants waiting to be sponsored.
Mr. Keita filed a legal petition with the Quebec Supreme Court on Thursday. The applicant, represented by immigration lawyer Maxime Lapointe, is suing the Quebec government to “compel it to set an annual threshold that will allow Quebec-destination families to benefit from a processing time comparable to non-Quebec-destination applicants.” is comparable.”
It is the federal government that processes applications for family reunification. However, Quebec has set a cap of around 10,000 immigrants in this category for 2024, and Ottawa cannot exceed that limit. Result: Files are piling up at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Last December, the wait to settle permanently with loved ones in Quebec was 41 months. Me Lapointe, who wants to shorten that period to 12 months, had also sent a formal notice to the federal and Quebec immigration ministries in December urging them to act. “I saw that the federal government seemed willing to deal with the files, but when I saw that Quebec didn't want it, I realized that Quebec was the culprit,” the lawyer stressed in an interview on Thursday with Le Devoir.
Threat of eviction
The applicant in this case, Kaba Keita, is a Guinean citizen who arrived in Quebec in 2018, the year in which he subsequently applied for asylum in Canada. He then said he was afraid to return to his family in Guinea. Since 2020, he has been married to Doussou Koulibaly, an immigrant, also Guinean, who became permanent resident a few years ago.
In March 2022, after receiving refugee status, Mr. Keita asserted under oath in a hearing before the Immigration and Refugees of Canada that his relationship with his family had improved, according to his lawyer. His status was subsequently revoked. Since then he has lived under the threat of deportation.
The media coverage of Mr. Keita's case in 2022, as well as a series of protests, allowed him to obtain a reprieve and stay temporarily in the territory of Quebec, in Quebec, where he worked for five years as a dishwasher at the Le Continental restaurant Years. However, he is still waiting for an application for family reunification with his wife.
“In the absence of a decision in his sponsorship file, the[Agence des services frontaliers du Canada] will effect a deportation from Canada,” his lawyer wrote in the application.
“There are many cases like Kaba Keita. “It’s not hard to find people who have higher processing times than the rest of Canada,” stressed Me Lapointe on the other end of the phone on Thursday. Because of this situation, he is asking the court to “declare the Quebec government's immigration planning inapplicable, invalid or ineffective,” in order to force it to set new, more forgiving thresholds for immigrants awaiting sponsorship, or to force it outright abolish these thresholds. It also calls for the government to recognize “processing times for the family reunification category as unreasonable and unusual.”
Legault inflexible
Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette declined to comment on the case on Thursday, arguing that it had been “legalized.” His migration plan does not include raising the threshold for family reunification next year. It would therefore remain frozen at 10,400 people.
Prime Minister François Legault took the liberty of defending his government's immigration thresholds on Thursday in Morin-Heights. “We can’t do that at the moment […] “The number of people undergoing family reunification is exploding for the same reasons I mentioned before: we are unable to provide these services,” he said. “Then there is also the ability to integrate into the French language because there are no requirements [pour le regroupement familial]. »
The CAQ elected official also attacked the Parti Québécois, which had suggested through its immigration spokesman Stéphane Handfield that “the CAQ has favored the economic aspect of its thresholds for years” and that “it may now place greater emphasis on family reunification.”
“I am surprised that the speaker of the Parti Québécois says that we should increase the number of family reunifications even though knowledge of French is not required,” the prime minister said. “Does this mean the PQ no longer cares about the future of French? I don't understand. »