May 22, 2018 – by Anna Mehler Paperny, Reuters
Canada is rejecting more refugee claims from people who crossed the border illegally as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government seeks to dissuade, block and turn back thousands more, according to new data obtained by Reuters.
August 17, 2017 – Anna Mehler Paperny and Allison Lampert, Reuters
TORONTO/MONTREAL (Reuters) – The number of asylum seekers who illegally crossed the U.S. border into Canada more than tripled last month, according to Canadian government data released on Thursday, as migrants worried about the U.S. administration’s immigration crackdown head north.
August 11, 2017 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Reuters
CHAMPLAIN, N.Y. (Reuters) – Asylum seekers clambering over a gully from upstate New York into Canada on Friday were undeterred by the prospect of days in border tents, months of uncertainty and signs of a right-wing backlash in Quebec.
August 10, 2017 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Reuters
SAINT-BERNARD-DE-LACOLLE, Quebec (Reuters) – Dozens of army tents dotted the Canadian border on Thursday to house hundreds of asylum seekers, many from Haiti, streaming into the country from upstate New York to file refugee claims.
Monday, February 8, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PAPAYE, HAITI — The Rosier family was always close. Just not this close.
Twenty-five people – parents, grandparents, children, nephews, cousins and in-laws – have been living in the family patriarch’s farmhouse in Haiti’s Plateau Central for close to a month.
Standing outside, hacking his palm trees to pieces to build shacks for his growing household, patriarch Ilson Rosier smiles and shrugs.
“They’re family – of course I have to take them in. We’ll do what we can.”
But his seven children and their families now sharing cooking, washing and living space are starting to worry how they’ll make ends meet.
The Rosier brood is among the hundreds of thousands who have fled devastated Port-au-Prince to seek refuge in the provinces.
Saturday, February 6, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PORT-AU-PRINCE — The cemetery reeks of death. Dozens of tombstones are overturned. Crypts have been upended, inverted and emptied of their macabre contents. It would look centuries old were it not for the bright blue paint bouncing sunlight off the broken gravestones.
The overpowering smell comes from the far side of the labyrinthine cemetery, where a plot near the street has been excavated and filled with corpses. More than 2,000 of them.
The plan is to pave over the spot and turn it into a memorial to those killed in the earthquake. But for now it’s simply a mass grave, holding corpses covered with pale dirt and concrete dust.
“Next Ghede will be wild,” says voodoo priest Menahem Laurent, referring to a holiday in early November similar to the Latin American Day of the Dead. “There will be so many ghosts.”
Friday, February 5, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
With a report from the Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Ten American Baptists face charges of child abduction and criminal association after trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border into the Dominican Republic without the government’s permission.
The group members, accused of flouting Haiti’s child-protection laws when the country is at its most vulnerable, were led out of a closed-door courtroom session yesterday afternoon, through a crush of reporters and onlookers and into police vehicles waiting to escort them back to the makeshift jail cells where they have spent the past week.
The Haitian government has imposed a moratorium on international adoptions following the earthquake, fearing that in the ensuing chaos the risk of child-trafficking, already a mounting problem in Haiti, would increase.
Thursday, February 4, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
CALEBASSE, HAITI — This is the town that sent its children away.
Its subsistence vegetable plots are all but destroyed; its buildings reduced to debris. If it was poor before the earthquake, it is desperately so now.
And the parents of Calebasse say they were just trying to do what was best for the kids they can no longer feed when they gave them to a group of American Baptists arrested for trying to spirit the 33 children across the border.
Many of them say they would try the same thing again.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PORT-AU-PRINCE — Their classrooms are rubble. So are their houses – scattered around Port-au-Prince, most of them are living “sous les belles étoiles.” Many of their professors are missing or dead.
But in the fissured remains of their university, these would-be teachers are planning a revolution. They sit at desks, taking scribbled notes as their rapid-fire ideas overlap one another over the sounds of 400 families living in tents outside, and one lone, loud rooster by the window. As Haiti’s already inadequate education system lies in ruins – and with it, one of the country’s best shots at sustainable development – these upstart students are among those who hope to reinvent what it means to learn in Haiti.
“We don’t just want to rebuild. We want to begin over again,” says Michel Fresner, a first-year education student at the Centre Formation d’Education Fondemontal.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
PORT-AU-PRINCE — It’s a strange sight on a traffic-choked downtown street across from a park that has become a crowded tent city: several dozen young men locked behind the wrought-iron bars of a rectangular, birdcage-like structure outside a police station.
The police say the men are looters, caught in the act. An officer gestures over his shoulder to rolls of fabric, building materials and dusty electronics.
A prison it’s not. But for now, and for no one knows how long, that’s where the alleged looters will stay.
a business of misfits 