Most Canadians have seen the familiar face of the Canada Border Services Agency: the border services officer who greets you at the airport or at the highway border crossing. But did you know there are CBSA officers working every day on this side of the border, within Canada, whose job it is to enforce immigration law? This month Border Voice talks to Brent Hardy about his 12 years of service as an inland enforcement officer. In fact Brent had so much to tell us about this multifaceted line of work that we had to split his story into two parts: look for Part 2 in next month’s Border Voice.

Border Voice: Brent, what do you do at the CBSA?

Brent Hardy: An inland enforcement officer is something like the ‘immigration police.’ Once a foreign national is past a port of entry—meaning they’re inside Canada—and we have some concern they may be inadmissible under the law (the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, or IRPA), we conduct investigations. And that ranges from the very initial stages of investigation, all the way through reporting them under IRPA, getting removal orders against them, and ultimately removing them from Canada, which includes sometimes escorting them back to their country of origin. 

BV: So as an inland enforcement officer, what kind of tasks do you do?

Brent: There are all kinds of different roles and responsibilities that you might have at one time or another as an IE officer—and I’ve done all of them in my time on the job. For example, for three years I served as the CBSA liaison to the Vancouver City Police, in the Downtown Eastside—a lot of drug addiction and criminal activity in that area. So I was situated with them, to be their liaison, so if they encountered any cases where there might be some concern about immigration, or inadmissibility, I would deal with those cases.

That’s the more on-the-ground, investigative side of things. There are other units that deal specifically with removals. For example in Vancouver we have the non-criminal removals unit, so these would be cases where refugee claims are made in Canada, they go through the entire process, they access all the legal avenues available to them, and they’ve exhausted all their appeals. Those cases come to the non-criminal removals unit to have them removed from Canada, or to have them depart the country somehow.

Another unit is criminal removals—where they deal exclusively with clients in Canada with criminal records, who have committed criminal acts, who are under removal orders, and they take their cases. Yet another unit is the national security unit, where they work on the more high-priority cases: war crimes, crimes against humanity, organized crime, national security.

BV: How did you get started?

Brent: I came into Citizenship and Immigration Canada in May 2001, through the public service recruitment campaign. I did not know much about the position at all when I came into it. There were a few possibilities on the table and they said, “Yeah, inland esnforcement might be something you’d find interesting; a lot of people take the job [to start out] and they stay in it.” So they kind of sold it to me. It sounded like a good opportunity, and I certainly have no regrets. It’s been very, very interesting.

BV: It must be a tough job; most of these folks do not want to leave, right?

Brent: My guess is that if everybody simply wanted to leave [voluntarily], my job would not exist. There would not need to be any enforcement element for our immigration laws. So yes, most of the people we deal with are people who don’t want to leave. There are rare exceptions, where circumstances in their lives have changed, and they come in and they say, well, it’s time to go home. But I would say that’s a miniscule percentage of the cases that we deal with. So yes, there are a lot of cases where people are extremely agitated that they are being required by law to leave the country. I’d say most of the cases are like that, and you have to deal with it on a daily basis.

BV: Can you give us some examples?

Brent: Yes, I’ve dealt with cases where there are whole families that have come to Canada, made claims for refugee status while here, and the cases have gone against them, and they come in with four or five little children, and it can be tough when a little kid is tugging on their mom or dad’s coat, saying, “Do we have to leave Canada?” That makes the job pretty difficult... I mean, you understand you’re doing a job that is necessary to maintain the integrity of the immigration process in Canada, but if you have a soft spot for people—basic human empathy and compassion—those moments can be difficult.

Now I’ve dealt with criminal removals, where it is not difficult, where they have a long and serious criminal record in Canada—it’s not as tough to execute those removal orders, to enforce the law. I’d say if you talk to most IE officers, with the serious criminality cases in particular, when you work a case from the start to the end, and you see that person on a plane, when you sign that confirmation of departure form, and they’ve left Canada, there is a real sense of satisfaction.

So there’s a real dichotomy there: on one hand you deal with cases where you put them on a plane and off they go, and there’s a sense of compassion that that’s very difficult for that family, but the cases where you really feel you’ve done your part to keep Canadian society safe—these are some pretty bad guys that we’re removing—there’s a real sense of satisfaction, yes.

BV: How many removals have you done?

Brent: About 120 escorted removals, where I had to travel with the person.

BV: What is the most unusual removal you’ve ever done?

Brent: I had to take a guy to East Timor once, three days before that country gained independence (from Indonesia). It was a long and grueling trip. Once there, I had about 45 minutes to get the guy into East Timor, which at that time was a real challenge because there was still some Portuguese oversight at immigration. But everything was in transition; there was really no government. The official was suspicious of this guy because he had no ID, but luckily the guy wanted back into East Timor, and he spoke some Portuguese, so he sorted things out with the official.

Once we were done I just turned around and did the whole itinerary in reverse. It took more than 60 hours each way. And needless to say I was very sick when I got back home to Vancouver.

So I can see how the job may sound exotic and exciting from the outside, but there are a lot of trips like that—and they are absolutely grueling and exhausting.

BV: Wow—that part of the job does not sound like very much fun. Now, something more general about the job: what kind of skills does somebody need to be a good inland enforcement officer?

[To be continued in the July edition of Border Voice…]