Our Statement on Bill C-2: Migrant Rights are Under Attack

Bill C-2 is yet another colonial weapon rooted in racism and xenophobia and an attack on migrant rights.

The Government of Canada has tabled Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act (or otherwise known in its entirety as “An Act respecting certain measures relating to the security of the border between Canada and the United States and respecting other related security measures:), an expansive and dangerous piece of legislation that reinforces carceral, colonial, and surveillance-based violence under the name of “security.” Behind its neutral bureaucratic framing is a coordinated attack on migrants, racialized people, and those living under precarity.

This bill builds infrastructure to surveil, detain, exclude, and erase. We recognize it as what it is: a step toward ICE-style immigration policing and totalitarian data control in so-called Canada.

Our Analysis

MAC is a migrant-led, member-run organization committed to agitation, education, and organizing for transformative justice. We fight for collective liberation, not compliance. Bill C‑2 is a direct threat to the communities we organize alongside and from.

Bill C-2:

• Expands CBSA power to access facilities free of charge, encouraging inland surveillance of workplaces, campuses, and community spaces in the name of “border enforcement”
• Authorizes inter-agency personal data sharing with federal and provincial bodies, laying the groundwork for immigration enforcement to leak into healthcare, social assistance, education, and housing
• Allows refugee claims to be withdrawn or deemed abandoned without due process - particularly targeting those who are sick, in crisis, or forced to move
• Enables the government to suspend or terminate immigration applications at will, consolidating unchecked power in the hands of Ministers
• Retroactively adds new grounds for denying refugee protection, deepening fear and confusion among claimants
• Permits state actors to open mail, seize letters, track movement, and access financial records with minimal oversight

How this impacts migrants in Newfoundland and Labrador

Migrants in this province already face isolation, racism, and a lack of access to social services as our rights continue to be held hostage in exchange for compliance. This bill now:

• Paves the way for CBSA presence in rural workplaces, student housing, and essential services
• Encourages employers and landlords to collaborate with enforcement under pressure
• Makes people afraid to access healthcare or report abuse for fear of triggering a file or warrant
• Expands policing in our communities policing that continues to threaten the very existence of BIPOC communities

It isn’t just an administrative threat. Bill C-2 threatens our very survival and risks turning it into something criminal.

Our Stance

We are a community of migrants and supporters organizing for migrant justice, and this bill in its core is antithetical to the very justice we call for. We aren’t a voice as an organization but one of a community of people who have been harmed by the system and threatened by the place we call home. We are people who have been made illegal on stolen land. We firmly and unapologetically oppose Bill C‑2 in its entirety. We reject the premise that surveillance equals safety. We reject the lie that borders create justice. And we reject a state that uses legislation to entrench fear and exclusion while calling it “order.” This bill is not reformable. It must be withdrawn.

Migrants are a part of the community, are people, and yet often only spoken of solely from an economic standpoint by the state, creating a rhetoric where our values as human beings are constantly overlooked and where decisions are made by the state about us as if we are currency or our rights are a tool to bargain over.

Today and every day, we call for our voices to be heard, for space where decisions are made, for our rights to be unconditional, and for our humanity to be valued. We call for a change in rhetoric and for the right to exist in a place many of us have come to call home. We continue to echo the call of nothing about us without us. We aren’t currency, nor are we tools, nor are we cash cows.

We also call for:

• The immediate rejection of Bill C‑2 in Parliament
• A commitment to regularization and status for all, and an end to criminalization
• An end to CBSA enforcement powers within communities and inland sites
• Protection of personal data and the end of inter-agency immigration surveillance
• Support for migrant-led organizing and investment in systems of collective care, not policing

We exist to build power together, not through hierarchy, but through solidarity and mutual aid. This bill is a test of who will stand up and who will stay silent.

We call on:

• Grassroots groups, unions, and students to mobilize publicly against Bill C‑2
• Legal workers to help us educate and challenge this bill’s constitutionality
• Allied movements across this land to join us in abolishing all systems that criminalize migration

We will not be silent.

Migrants belong. Borders don’t.

‍