Is Abdilahi Elmi’s deportation a failure by the Canadian government?
Posted August 20, 2019 5:13 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
In today’s Big Story podcast, unless something happens, 34-year-old Abdilahi Elmi will be deported next week. He’ll be sent to Somalia, where he hasn’t lived since he was 10 years old, and where he doesn’t know the language or culture. He’s being sent to a town that suffered a devastating terror attack just last month.
Elmi is being deported because he’s not a Canadian citizen. He’s not a citizen because at the time he needed to apply for citizenship, he was in the care of child welfare services. And they didn’t apply on his behalf. Elmi is not the first refugee to find himself in this predicament, and unless a change is made, he won’t be the last.
How do kids fall through the cracks, and turn into adults whose lack of citizenship means that they are punished twice for any criminal case—once by the law and once by a system that should have helped them decades ago?
GUEST: Robyn Maynard, research, activist, author of Policing Black Lives
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You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.
