As people are picked up off the streets, thrown into detention centres and deported to third countries, the Safe Third Country Act might face another challenge.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, tens of thousands of American citizens sought, and gained, refuge in Canada. They weren’t technically refugees – most applied for landed immigrant status – but what they were seeking was, in effect, a safe place to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.

The official policy of Canada’s “Department of Manpower and Immigration” was not to ask about applicants’ military status; these were mostly young, educated, middle-upper-class men, after all – making them precisely the type of “desirable” immigrant seen to offer benefits to Canada.

There hasn’t been anything close to that major influx of American “refugees” to Canada since then, of course, but individuals from the U.S. never stopped trying. There was a small wave when George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq sent U.S. Army deserters such as Jeremy Hinzman fleeing to Canada.

Since 2013, there have been 3,142 claims filed by asylum-seekers alleging persecution in the U.S., according to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, including 102 filed in the first three months of 2025 alone (by comparison, 118 were filed in all of 2022).

There was a significant spike in applications after Donald Trump was........

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