AKWESASNE MOHAWK – New, dramatic details emerge on the tragedy of the Iordache family, who drowned in the St. Lawrence River while trying to reach the United States after being expelled from Canada. 

According to attorney Peter Ivanyi told CTV on Tuesday afternoon, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) bought the plane tickets for the two Romanian citizens of Roma ethnicity (Florin Iordache and Cristina Monalisa Zenaida, both 28), and the their two children – two-year-old Evelyn and one-and-a-half-year-old Eylen – but the family never showed up at the airport: Evelyn and Eylen, both born in Canada and Canadian citizens, were not part of the deportation order but, according to Ivanyi, the tickets for the children had been bought to “make sure the parents were deported”. Yes, deported. Because this is the term that recurs in Canadian immigration laws: the very same word that evokes dark times, such as those of Hitler’s Germany.

The young father from Toronto, who therefore risked deportation to Romania with his whole family, “felt that he had run out of options” and “must have been very desperate”, underlined the lawyer, when he made the fatal decision not to appear at Pearson Airport on March 29 and to flee with his wife and two children to the United States across the freezing waters of the St. Lawrence.

Ivanyi said he had been advising Florin and Monalisa since 2018, when they arrived in Canada, and explained that the IRCC had recently rejected his clients’ pre-removal risk assessment, i.e. their request to suspend deportation in order to be able to attending their children’s appointment with a neurologist at the Hospital for Sick Children. “And so when immigration said ‘no, you have to get on that plane on March 29’, I’m sure Florin thought ‘I can’t, I have to go somewhere where at least I can temporarily give my children what they need’, also because he didn’t believe he could get adequate medical care for his children in Romania” said Ivanyi. “And maybe he was right”.

Furthermore, for the Iordache family, returning to Romania would have been a nightmare: there, in fact, they would have been discriminated against due to their ethnicity. “And so I think (Florin) thought that, for the sake and interests of his children, he was left with no other choice as he had pretty much exhausted every option to stay in Canada” he said, adding that Florin appeared to be exhausted and with a very heavy weight on his shoulders. “Florin never talked about himself. His only concern was the needs of his two young children,” added the lawyer.

As is known, the tragedy of the Iordache family is not the only one because another entire family – from Mehsana, Gujarat (India) – died in the same shipwreck: Praveenbhai Chaudhari, 50 years old; his wife Dakshaben, 45; the son Meet, 20, and the daughter Vidhi, 23; they had entered Canada on a tourist visa two months ago.

Meanwhile, the Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC) held a protest sit-in outside the North York office of Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino on Tuesday afternoon in response to the tragedy of eight migrant deaths. During the demonstration, the organizers delivered a petition to the minister’s office calling for the end of the STCA, the Safe Third Country Agreement, an agreement stipulated between the USA and Canada to “better” manage the flow of asylum seekers at the shared land border, recently restrictively modified following a significant influx of asylum seekers.

Protesters also demanded permanent resident status for all migrants. “We’ve been saying for years that this deal kills people,” Syed Hussan, director of MWAC, said at the rally.

One of the speakers, David Copzaru, is a Roma refugee from Romania. “We came here to be protected,” he told the crowd. “We are not treated as human beings in Romania and throughout Europe because of our color and our language. And because we are Roma, we are gypsies, we are not accepted as human beings”. Just like in Hitler’s time.

In the pic above, the protest held in front of Minister Mendicino’s office in North York on Tuesday (photo from Twitter- @MWACCanada)

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