LAUSR

To the Honourable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Minister of Health; the Honourable Ralph Goodale, Minister of Community Safety and Emer­ gency Preparedness; the Honour­ able Ahmed D Hussen, Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizen­ ship; and the Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Over the past 6 years, Canada has held about 45 000 people in immigration detention. For the first time in over a decade, Canada is projected to see a sharp rise in the total number of detainees. Children continue to be detained in Canada in large numbers, with current pro­ jections exceeding last year’s total of 162 children held in immigration detention. We are a group of health­care pro­ viders working in Canada who—like many around the world—have been watching, with horror, the news of the separation of more than 2000 child migrants from their parents in the USA. This cruelty is apparently the newest front in the Trump Administration’s war against asylum seekers. We’ve heard audio recordings of young children begging for their parents and read first­person accounts of migrants being told they will never see their children again. As health­care providers, we re­ gularly see the results of childhood trauma in patients of all ages. Harm done at a young age can reverberate throughout one’s life, causing intense distress and health consequences. We are not surprised that the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Canadian Paediatric Society, the American Medical Association, and the Canadian Medical Association have all come out with strong statements condemning the separation of migrant children from their families. In Canada, immigration deten tion of both adults and children, and family separation, have been a long­standing and grave concern. Canadian research and reports have repeatedly shown the sev ere mental health effects of even short­term detention on both adults and children. These effects can in clude depression, anxiety, and post­trau matic stress disorder sympt oms in adults, and regression of dev elopmental milestones, sleep dis rupt ion, anxiety, and depression in children. We urge our federal leaders to take action on this issue and consider how history will look back on what we as a country choose to do right now. Although Canada’s practice of detaining migrant children is not new, the general public is now rapidly becoming more aware of it. To criticise the USA when children are being detained and separated from their families in Canada is hypocrisy, actions that cause similar severe psychological trauma, which doctors and other mental health experts are now speaking out about. For the past few years, health­care providers in Canada have been calling for an end to the indefinite detention of migrants, the separation of fa­ milies, and the detention of children. In 2017, the Canadian Medical Associ­ ation passed a resolution calling for “legislative changes to protect migrants and refugees from arbitrary and indefinite detention in jails and jail­like facilities.” We call on the Canadian Government to take action immediately (panel).