Challenging the silence around race and racism in Canada’s immigration detention system

Guest post by Dr. Efrat Arbel, Prasanna Balasundaram, Hanna Gros and Nana Yanful. Dr Efrat Arbel is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia Allard School of Law. Arbel’s research focused on the law and policy of immigration detention, refugee protection, and border governance. Her research has helped shape law and policy in Canada, and has introduced creative tools to advance legal education and public engagement. 

Prasanna Balasundaram is Director of Downtown Legal Services, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law’s clinical legal education program. He works on complex immigration and refugee law matters, with a focus on constitutional, inadmissibility, exclusion, and national security cases. 

Hanna Gros is a refugee lawyer and a human rights advocate. She previously worked at Human Rights Watch, and was instrumental in co-leading a national campaign that brough an end to the use of provincial jails for immigration detention in Canada. Gros has authored many leading reports on immigration detention.  

Nana Yanful is founder of Yanful Law, and award-wining racial justice lawyer with over 20 years of experience in community building, racial justice and equity work focusing on systemic racism, and anti-Black racism in particular. She is the former founding Legal Director of the Black Legal Action Centre. 

This post is the second in a two-part series on structural racism in Canada’s immigration detention system. 

 Across contemporary border regimes, the exercise of carceral power is increasingly mediated not only through the governance of borders and the people who cross them, but also through the governance of knowledge and data. Within these regimes, silence operates as a mechanism of obscuration, allowing entrenched patterns of harm and injustice to persist while limiting state accountability.

A particularly significant manifestation of this governance is the silence on race and racism within systems of immigration enforcement and border control. When race is excluded from official analyses of such systems, racialised outcomes of carceral governance become harder to see. Patterns of racial harm can be more easily dismissed as isolated cases or aberrations, rather than understood as intrinsic to, and structural features of, these broader systems of carceral governance.

Canada’s immigration detention system offers a clear illustration of how this carceral governance operates in practice. In our recent report, we researched Canada’s immigration detention system by placing race and racism at the centre of our analysis. Guided by Hindpal Singh Bhui’s foundational insight that it is “not possible to fully understand the dynamics of immigration detention without also understanding debates about race, ethnicity, and racism within and across national boundaries”, our report presents the first comprehensive study of race and racism in Canada’s immigration detention system. In this post, we provide an overview of Canada’s immigration detention system and of our research, and speak to the broader institutional silence about race and racism – as a central problem in the system. 

Foregrounding qualitative data 

Our analysis of race and racism in Canada’s immigration detention system can be understood against the backdrop of significant constraints on research access. In Canada, research on immigration detention is heavily restricted. It is difficult to conduct independent research within detention facilities or directly with detained persons and detaining authorities, and detailed, comprehensive data on immigration detention is either challenging to access, or does not exist. This has led to what Sarah Turnbull and Joao Velloso identify as a “crisis in transparency” in the system.  

Like many governments around the world, the Canadian government does not collect or publish race-disaggregated data on immigration detention. The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), the federal agency responsible for immigration enforcement, releases only limited statistics on immigration detention. CBSA collects detention data disaggregated by country of origin – which in itself, serves as an inadequate proxy for race – but this data is not publicly posted and is available only through paid and time-consuming access to information requests. As a result, the available data provides little insight into the operations of Canada’s immigration detention system. 

In response to this transparency crisis, our research foregrounds qualitative data as essential to the analysis of race and racism in immigration detention. In addition to reviewing the limited available public records, we conducted 50 interviews with formerly detained persons, lawyers, paralegals, support workers, and other professionals across Canada. The research was completed over the course of 18 months, between January 2024 and June 2025. 

Overview of Canada’s immigration detention system 

Under Canadian law, the CBSA can arrest and detain non-Canadian citizens for a variety of reasons. Presently, CBSA detains the vast majority of people in one of three Immigration Holding Centres in Canada, but also has authority to detain certain people in a federal correctional facility. Prior to 2025, CBSA also had authority to detain people in provincial jails. To date, the CBSA remains the only major law enforcement agency in Canada without independent civilian oversight. Canada is one of few countries in the Global North, alongside the UK, that does not impose time limits on immigration detention. 

Between 2015-2025, Canada detained almost 60,000 people, including children. As our report demonstrates, roughly 90% were detained on grounds that CBSA suspected they may not appear for future immigration proceedings, or because CBSA was not satisfied with their identity documents – all without an allegation that they pose a risk to public safety. Thousands more are restricted under Canada’s Alternatives to Detention programme. 

Our report further illustrates that the vast majority of people in immigration detention are racialised. This finding aligns with recent reports by human rights organisations documenting that Black men from countries in Africa and the Caribbean are detained for disproportionately longer periods, and under harsher conditions of detention than other groups. Research participants we interviewed indicated that nearly everyone confined in immigration detention is racialised – one lawyer called this the “biggest and most obvious aspect” of how race operates in the system. Another lawyer described walking into a detention centre as “a gut punch,” recounting that the men in custody were almost exclusively Black. A third reflected on more than a decade of practice, stating: “I’ve never represented anyone in immigration detention who wasn’t racialised”. 

Racism embedded in Canada’s immigration detention system 

Our report concludes that Canada’s immigration detention regime systematically produces racially adverse outcomes that disproportionately impact racialised people, and Black men in particular. Our research shows that Canada’s immigration detention system was built on explicitly racist laws and structures. We demonstrate that while the explicit racial language of past laws has been removed, the same racial logic continues to shape key detention decisions. Our research further analyses how immigration detention intersects with other state systems, for example, policing and the criminal legal system, which, as Canadian courts and governments have long recognised, are shaped by systemic racism. We demonstrate that, for example, heavy policing of Black and other racialised communities, disproportionate traffic stops, disproportionate criminalisation, overuse of wellness checks, all funnel racialised people into immigration detention at disproportionate rates.

In analysing the law and policy of Canada’s immigration detention system, we identify four structural features of the system that allow racial bias and racial stereotypes to shape discretionary decision-making at every stage of the detention continuum. These include broad legal discretion for detaining enforcement authorities, weak standards for the evidence required by the system, deference to immigration authorities, and the absence of any meaningful oversight of the system and its actors. We conclude that as a result of these combined factors, racialised people, and Black men in particular, bear the brunt of the system’s harshest conditions and encounter systemic barriers to fair treatment and timely release. 

“No one talks about race” 

One of our most significant conclusions is that although Canada’s immigration detention system is overwhelmingly populated by racialised people, and disproportionately by Black men, institutional actors and officials do not talk about race – or racism – inside the immigration detention infrastructure. 

While the racialised composition of immigration detention is widely visible to lawyers and service providers working within the system, as well as to detained persons, the broader structures that produce these patterns are rarely acknowledged by the government or its actors, and remain obscured. Research participants described racial disparities as ever-present in immigration detention, yet implicit, sanitised and imperceptible, arising through “invisible biases”, that are difficult to “pin down”. One lawyer noted that while “the racialised patterns within the detention centres are so obvious… no one talks about race, except the detainees”. A service-provider observed: “race is… built into the structures of the system”, adding, “we see it with our eyes closed. It's very easy to detect. But the ones who make those rules don't see it. They don't know it”. 

The institutional and governmental silence around race exemplifies what Debra Thompson terms “racial aphasia”, a form of “calculated forgetting” through which states suppress the historical and structural role of race in shaping the modern international order. As Thompson argues, racial aphasia reflects a refusal to acknowledge that the “modern world system was founded on, and continues as, a hierarchical racial order”. Tendayi Achiume describes racial aphasia as an “unwillingness to confront the persisting and imperial operation of race in society”. In her analysis, by refusing to name either race or racism, states can maintain the formal appearance of neutrality even as their policies generate racially patterned outcomes. Silence around race enables states to perpetuate racialised systems of exclusion without confronting the origins, operations, or effects of those same systems. 

Canada’s immigration detention regime reflects this dynamic. The institutional reluctance to name race within the system, the absence of race-disaggregated data, and the routine normalisation of racial disparities together form a pattern of carceral silencing. As our report maintains, this silence on race and racism within Canada’s immigration detention system is not incidental to the system’s operation, but is rather foundational to its governing architecture. The fact that race and racism are not measured or spoken of within the system allows the racial harms of the system to persist and thrive.

The challenge then is to refuse this institutional silence. When race is not part of official accounts of immigration detention, the racialised outcomes of the system become more difficult to identify. Documenting, analysing, and meaningfully addressing race and racism is therefore not just about a call for better data; it is a necessary step towards naming – and challenging – the racial harms generated by the system. 

At the same time, transparency alone will not solve the problems we have identified. Where racialised harms are entrenched, incremental reform risks obscuring rather than addressing the problem. We conclude that Canada must commit to the gradual abolition of the immigration detention system.