When US President Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on citizens from several Muslim-majority countries in February 2017, Canadian officials had to scramble for details about what exactly the new measure meant, documents released by the US Department of Homeland Security show.
As The Canadian Press discovered via a US Freedom of Information Act request, Canadian government officials bombarded their southern neighbor with a list of 16 detailed questions, trying to figure out various parts of the order, from refugee claims to biometric tracking.
Some of the questions included: “Do measures in the executive order related to US privacy policies affect the ‘treatment of data' held about Canadians”; “Are there more details about planned standards to prevent ‘terrorist or criminal infiltration by foreign nationals'”; and “What impact, if any, does the order have on the asylum determination system,” the website reports.
According to the “Safe Third Country Agreement” between the US and Canada, an asylum seeker must claim refuge in whichever country they come to first.
When the order — known officially as the Executive Order on Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States — was signed on February 1, 2017, it immediately caused massive confusion, leading to lots and lots of incidents, such as 200 Canadian residents suddenly having their Nexus trusted-traveller cards disabled, CBC reported.
It…
