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 (IE) 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: this is Part 2, while Part 1 appeared in last month’s Border Voice.

Border Voice: What kind of skills does somebody need to be a good inland enforcement officer?

Brent Hardy: You have to be able to think quickly, to think on your feet. It can be a hazardous job. We go into homes and execute warrants, where there are people hiding, and we don’t know if they have weapons. It’s a job that requires a lot of due diligence, alertness, and risk assessment. And you need the ability to make good decisions in a very short amount of time with very limited information.

Also, having good people skills is a huge factor as an IE officer. You need to be able to walk into situations where things have escalated, where there is a lot of raw emotion, and deal with it, dial it down to a more reasonable level. And I’m not just talking about removals here; these skills are really important to have when you’re doing investigations and all the other kinds of work we have to do.

BV: Can you give our readers an example where you used your people skills to get a situation under control?

Brent: Yes. When I was fairly new on the job, we went to an apartment in Vancouver looking for a guy who was wanted for removal. A woman let us in, we asked her about this guy’s whereabouts, but she said she didn’t know. She let us do a cursory search, just a quick look around the apartment, then we exited.

But we decided to stick around because we had a suspicion that everything was not as it seemed. So we waited outside the door, and sure enough, we heard a male voice inside the apartment. We knocked again, and then we heard a lot of scurrying. A few minutes later, she answered the door. We said we had a few more things to ask her, so she let us in. Then we just confronted her; we said: “Look, we’re pretty sure he’s here, and we’d like to look around.” Strangely enough, she said yes, and she granted us access to the place.

We did a thorough search and we found him under the bed. He did not want to come out. This guy had a serious criminal record, he knew we were looking for him, and he had a history of fleeing from law enforcement in the past. So we knew there was some potential here for trouble.

But we managed to drag him out from under the bed, and got him out into the living room. He was half-dressed (no shirt), and he was extremely hostile and agitated. At this point it looked like we were going to have to go ‘hands-on’—to take him down and control him in that way. My adrenalin was through the roof. Bear in mind, this was one of my first interactions of this kind on the job.

But at some point something kicked in and I just started talking. That’s all—just talking to him. And his level of agitation eventually decreased to the point where we were able to get him to sit up on the couch. We also had to deal with his spouse, because she was highly agitated at this time as well, and you can imagine what her state would have been if we had had to go ‘hands-on’ with the guy. So it took about 15 minutes to go from a place where it looked like ‘the fight was on’ to a place where he calmly walked into his bedroom, got dressed, and allowed us to put him in handcuffs.

BV: What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Brent: The people I work with. By and large they are fun and interesting people. This type of work attracts a certain personality—a strong personality type. So I work with a lot of characters. I might be perceived as a character by some of my colleagues. I work with a lot of great people. The job itself is a fantastic job.

And it may sound a bit corny, but I think most inland enforcement officers see their job as an important one in the overall spectrum of the immigration system. We see our role as one that helps maintain the integrity of the immigration process. We take the work very seriously. There are very few people in my line of work who show up just to collect a paycheque.